Not ever

Hell no! We send billions to other countries. Stop doing that and fund the damn program we have all been paying into our entire lives.

It has been mismanaged and it's the program that's had the largest impact on reducing elder poverty, so he wasn't wrong

It was always a ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes are failures by design.

It needs to end, but it needs to be phased out. I don’t know exactly what the age cut-off is, but if you’re over 30 and your retirement strategy includes social security, you’re likely to stupid to understand what insolvency is.

For the military pension haters, they’re basically doing an industry standard retirement program now, so the traditional retirements system is gone and will fade as me and my peers fade.

If an actual responsible congress had the numbers and fortitude they would just replace social security tax AND the federal tax with a national sales tax or fair tax, and eliminate the program, making the cut-off at 40, but give tax breaks to those over 30 to catch up on retirement savings. About the only way to make it work is to also give smaller businesses tax breaks to setup matching funds for employee 401k’s. Hell, they should just replace social security with an individual 401k…make fuckers work and pay into their own retirement so they aren’t a burden on society.  Dumbasses can keep their money or they can use the tax exemption and put into a mobile 401k that they can carry with them for life. Even if a company they work for has a retirement system, and they get vested, they can roll those savings without penalty into their personal 401k.

Cutting off social security would at least force these fuckers to prioritize the budget. As much as I hate any taxes or social programs, you still need something for the elderly widows and those who are handicapped and who can’t work…that “should” only be about 0.087% of the population and regular taxes should easily support that.

As much as I love my elderly parents (both are 88), my father and mother have been drawing social security for the last 25 years, getting close to surpassing how many years they were in the work force. It helps as it’s just my dad’s retirement check, but if he was allowed to take those social security fund and do his own investments, he wouldn’t need tax payers to support him now…

ROCK6

Wait, we only do this discussion on odd-numbered days.

Not ever is a long time.

Demographics will put it on the table.

exactly.  Lump sum payment please.

To be eligible for Social Security retirement benefits, a worker born after 1928 must have accumulated at least 40 quarters of work in "covered employment". A "quarter of coverage" generally means the three-month calendar quarter. In addition, you must earn at least $1,510 in a quarter (in 2022) for it to count.

Now do SSI.

Completely different animal with a similar name.

Agree.

At least have the option to opt out when you start working. Let me opt out now, take a lump sum, and not pay into the rest of my life.

I would have loved to have invested my contributions instead of having them to the .gov to fuck up.

There is no lump sum to take.  The money is already gone.  The best one can hope for is a gradual cancellation of the program, but it can't stop without a lot of people taking a haircut.

I'm looking forward to universal healthcare and increased government provided income.

Not sure why this is such a hard concept to grasp. Money is gone. It wasn’t set aside for you. It was spent the moment it was taken from your check. Just another tax paid that the average citizen does not get an in kind return.

I wouldn't say before.

Mil retirement can go, but these are people who sacrificed their bodies for 20+ years in a war-obsessed country.

Mil retirees are a ways down on the list of freeloaders needing to be cut off.

Congress is welcome to change the retirement plan in contracts with new recruits.  They've done it before.

And they haven’t raised the retirement age since inception. Up it to 80 and it fixes a lot of the problem.

Though that is extremely unlikely, considering recruitment is already in the shitter

Damned Japanese and their sauces

Incorrect. It has been raised.

I didn’t say full benefit age. You can still take it at 62.

At the expense of others....But that's by design.

I took mine at 62, I don't need it but I paid in a fortune and the extra $2300 a month is nice.

Be drawing mine in about 18 months, can’t wait….

When the Gov is broke and no other countries will take our money for us to buy "goods and services".... we have to trade stuff for goods and services.....it will...the hard way.

SS is not sustainable in its current form.  If it was run properly, such as you had to maintain a bank account to put it in and didn't touch it until retirement......AND THE GOVERMENT COULDN'T EITHER...it might work.

Even if many don't want to admit it, currently FICA taxes are a slush fund, the following is Medicare...if you think it hasn't happened with your FICA taxes you are in denial:


Just think about this really hard when the dollar is not longer accepted...


Before anyone jumps in that hasn't been following this thread from the start.  I think SS is a Ponzi scheme and it should be killed somehow but just turning the switch off or  the "fuck you keep paying me" answers are going nowhere.  A few ideas have been tossed around but even here nobody can agree and swigging purses doesn't even describe it.  Overall politically we are on more common ground than the average of Americans as a whole.

ETA ...okay answered but the amount you get at that age has changed.



Are we talking SS retirement or something else?  In the past at age 65 you could draw full SS benefits, now it is 67.  Admit not a huge change but it has been done in the past.  Now the income limits at which they tax your SS hasn't changed since they started taxing it in the 80's.

With the average life span of 76 (and falling) it would cure quite a few things.....the question is do you phase this in.... or the guy who is 63 and drawing SS has to go back to work?

Average life expectancy in 1935 was 61.7. So SS was 3.3 years older than that. Now we have benefit age (pick whichever value you see usable) well under life expectancy.

It should have been a phase in. But none of it matters now because the budget will implode this decade with Medicare going kaboom.

Rated T for everyone

I agree with that.

I'm almost exactly 5 years from getting my WEP ravaged SS. Seeing how fucked the economy is going to be for my kids and everyone else in gen z, I'd be fine with ending that ponzi scheme shit right now. All of us have been suckered into socialism and it's worked by appealing to our base nature of selfishness (I want what's owed to me even though I know it doesn't really exist and has to be taken from the paychecks of younger Americans who likely will never get their money back). Do I want a few hundred extra dollars a month? Of course I do. But if I could vote to end the entire program right now to relieve the overwhelming and unfair burden about to be placed upon younger generations, I would. Hopefully someday after most of us older Americans are dead and gone, the younger  generations will do what's right for those coming after them and end this fiscal madness and theft forever.

Or he could have lost it all and he'd be forced to  live in your basement surviving on cat food

My various deferred comp retirement plans have all lost a ton of money over the past thirty years and the fees nickel and dime you at every turn

Not everyone wants to spend hours out of every week tracking the activity of their investment choices for  a retirement that's possibly decades in the future.
The lack of retirement planning now shows that most people arent willing to do that. Or can't , depending on their income level.

Why would someone be eating cat food while living in their kid’s basement?  

I’ve said before I’d let my contributions be stolen for good if my descendants never had to pay into and I got to see it be destroyed.

I agree.

And no, I'm not going to read the 21 pages of boomer rationalizations for why stealing from their grandkids is ok.

I’m getting all of mine one way or the other. I got some EX-Presidents mask.

Please do, but give me a refund of all I contributed, double the 401k contribution limits, and compel businesses to increase worker's pay by 6.25% to account for the "employer contribution" half.