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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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Is it though?
(From Bard) "The Social Security trust funds are projected to run out of money by 2034. This means that the Social Security administration will only be able to pay out 77% of a retiree's full benefits."
Which I get isn't exactly the same as what OP is claiming, but it is still pretty concerning for those of us not close to retirement age
Read any SS Trustees report. It doesn't have "money", it has debt instruments (bonds), which are essentially a document saying "we the government owe ourselves a thousand dollars". You can print those all day, it's only sourcing that money that has any kind of direct consequence (taxation, inflation, etc.).
And yes, that does raise an interesting question of, what did they do with the actual money we paid into the programs, if the only thing in the trust fund is bonds.
Don't they pull from SS funds to pay for other things but then "give it back" at some point? I feel like I read something about that, maybe what's being paid back isn't "cash" but bonds?
In effect, the bonds I mentioned are just inverted loans. The Treasury takes in $1k from payroll taxes for these programs, issues a bond to the trust fund saying "I owe you $1k plus interest", spends the $1k on whatever (I guess primarily the discretionary budget) and eventually has to somehow generate money to pay it back with interest.
In terms of whether or not bonds were "borrowed" - this wouldn't exactly matter in a meaningful sense, but I'm not clear this ever actually happened in the first place. There was some claim about, when the trust fund was mixed with the general fund 1968-1990, maybe the government took bonds out of the program, but you have to remember that inside the government, that's not something of value, that's just an obligation the government has to pay to itself, it's a big nothing burger. The outstanding liabilities from Social Security to the actual beneficiaries (elderly people) exist regardless of how the government is doing their accounting internally.
It’s even more concerning for those of us who are close. Even most of us with savings are pretty reliant on that for retirement
Isn't "exactly" still means the statement "bankrupt" is false. Don't move goalposts in the claims. That's disingenuous and only adds to the misinformation.