What a cruel irony that we learned on June 9 that Social Security is going broke even sooner than we thought. The Social Security trust fund will be exhausted in 2032, according to the latest Trustees Report. How odd that it is even referred to as a “trust fund,” because there is no trust, and there is no fund.
Because of the Ponzi scheme structure of Social Security that only works if you have more young people paying in than old people collecting checks, the system is crashing. Right now, roughly 11,000 Americans are retiring every day (the baby boomers), and only about 8,000 Americans are entering the workforce, thanks to the declining birth rate.
This is why the red ink gets deeper every year and the government won’t even be able to pay the meager benefits promised.
This financial trainwreck should have been solved decades ago; it could have been, if Congress had allowed all young people to take the 12 percent snatched from every paycheck and instead invest in the stock and bond market over 40 years. If this had happened, people such as me who are nearing retirement age (I’m 66 years old) would have about $1.5 million each in our accounts and could collect a monthly benefit three times higher than what Social Security promises to pay.
That also would have made future generations better off because all future liabilities of the system would be eliminated, since all future benefits would come from the personal accounts. There would be no need for benefit cuts or tax increases to keep the leaky boat solvent.
The presidential candidate who first put this reform on the table was Steve Forbes in 1996—30 years ago. Then-President George W. Bush picked the idea and tried to implement it in 2005.
Twenty years ago, this would have allowed young people to have personal accounts for Social Security with the money invested in stocks and bonds.
But he got shot down. Nearly every Democrat made accusations that this “privatization” plan would be “too risky.” Uh-huh!
Since then, stocks are only up by 725 percent (including the reinvestment of dividends). Every young person in America would be on his way to being a pension millionaire if we had adopted personal accounts.
We just learned from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk the awesome power of markets in creating wealth. Imagine if every worker today had been able to own shares of SpaceX.
Now, of course, markets go up and down, and we have had several devastating crashes, as we saw in 2008. But every time that happens, the market turns around after a few years and speeds ahead. There has been no 40-year period when stocks and bonds would have performed worse than the tiny benefits Social Security offers.
Even a lifetime minimum-wage worker would be a pension millionaire today if he could have invested the money in an index fund. Plus, the more you work, the more money you’d accumulate in your account. You could even leave some of that money in your personally owned account. Isn’t that part of the American dream?
The people in Congress and the left-wing interest groups who sideswiped this plan off the road owe the American workers an apology. They cost us more than $1 million each. And now they are trapping young Americans in the same retirement benefit plan that pays out roughly $4,000 per month. Good luck making ends meet with that. Have the politicians been to the grocery store lately?
Now what’s even worse is that many in Congress who blocked private accounts 20 years ago want to raise the taxes on young workers for Social Security and cut the benefits to pay for Washington’s own blunders.
There is a light at the end of this tunnel. It’s too late for my generation—sadly. We were ripped off by government in the worst deal ever: Social Security.
The good news is it’s not too late for the millennials and the Generation Z twentysomethings to demand a much better deal. End the Ponzi scheme now. Let the young tap into the magical powers of compound interest. Turn their taxes into an investment in America’s future. With world-class entrepreneurs out there such as Musk, who would bet against that?
