I have heard several individuals who I have respect for say, "the problem with social security is the big increase in retirees." That sounds very logical to a "one mover". We do have more people who are on social security than we have ever had and it is growning every day. We also have a smaller percentage of people paying in compared to the number who are now on social security and that is getting worse too. Have I built the case for all these individuals? For some "one movers", I may have, but for those with a real brain, I am sure they are not buying this line.
All those people who are now retiring and going on social security, were workers a few years ago paying into social security. We never had so many people who were paying in. When social security first started, there were people who were ready to go onto social security who had only been paying for a very few years. Now, the system has come into balance with all the people who are collecting paying in for a much longer period of time compared to past years. Those are the facts.
If that is the case, then what has gone wrong if it is not the large number of people who are now going onto social security? It is the basic system. Most people think that when they pay into social security as does their employer, think that money is being saved some where in the government and earning interest to pay for their retirement. Sorry, that is not the way it works. If it did, there would be no problem today because all those who were now retiring would be collecting their "own" money. They would be getting back the money they paid in. Here is what or elected officials in Washington DC did.
More money was coming into social security than was being paid out. That would be logical. If you were saving money for college and if you looked at the account, there would be more going in than coming out. Simple, right? Here was the problem. These mental retarded people who we elected and sent to Washington DC noticed that the social security bank account was getting very big and it was just sitting there earning interest. They could not stand the fact that his money was just sitting there and not being spent. They were sent to Washington DC to "fight" for the people who sent them there. They were charged with the job of "bring home the bacon", so that is exactly what they did for over 75 years. They took the money out of the social security bank account and gave the money to the people who voted for them. It was like "funny money" that they could use to keep their seat in Washington DC and use the money to buy votes. It worked for years because there was enough money coming in to pay off those who had retired, but not enough to pay for those who retired in the future.
There is a fact about the future and that is, it always comes. We are now in the future and the reason there is not enough money in the social security account to pay those who have just retired is that it was spent by the people we elected. They gave the money to us and we spent it. Obama went even one step farther and let people pay in less until he was re-elected. As a result the money in the social security account was used up faster than it would have been. I think that you can see that the problem is not the increase in the number of people who are now going on social security or the fewer people who are paying in. Because we have fewer workers now means that we will be paying out "less" in the future. If the money was not stolen by our polititians in Washington DC, it would be there for those now going on and those who will go on in the future.
Remember, there is no free lunch. You can only get out of the bank the amount you put in plus any interest that you earned. The interest earned by the social security account is "on paper" the interest paid by the government on government bonds. The Fed has driven down the interest rate by printing money so that the social security account earns very little interest compared to what it would have been had the Fed not screwed up the bond market. That is just one problem that most people do not understand.
Bottom line, the problem is not the number of people who are going on social security. It is the system and the way our elected officials have screwed it up. Now that the bank has been robbed, we have to either put the money back in the account or cut the checks to people on social security.
