Posted on 12/08/2012 4:42:06 AM PST by IbJensen
Have you noticed, your Social Security check is now referred to as a "Federal Benefit Payment"?
The government is now referring to our Social Security checks as a “Federal Benefit Payment.”This isn’t a benefit – its earned income!
Not only did we all contribute to Social Security but our employers did too.
It totaled 15% of our income before taxes. If you averaged $30K per year over your working life, that's close to $180,000 invested in Social Security.
If you calculate the future value of your monthly investment in social security ($375/month, including both your and your employer’s contributions) at a meager 1% interest rate compounded monthly, after 40 years of working you'd have more than $1.3+ million dollars saved! This is your personal investment.
Upon retirement, if you took out only 3% per year, you'd receive $39,318 per year, or $3,277 per month.
That’s almost three times more than today’s average Social Security benefit of $1,230 per month, according to the Social Security Administration (Google it - it’s a fact).
And your retirement fund would last more than 33 years (until you're 98 if you retire at age 65)! I can only imagine how much better most average-income people could live in retirement if our government had just invested our money in low-risk interest-earning accounts.
Instead, the folks in Washington pulled off a bigger Ponzi scheme than Bernie Madoff ever did. They took our money and used it elsewhere. They “forgot” that it was OUR money they were taking. They didn’t have a referendum to ask us if we wanted to lend the money to them.
And they didn’t pay interest on the debt they assumed. And recently, they’ve told us that the money won’t support us for very much longer. But is it our fault they misused our investments?
And now, to add insult to injury, they’re calling it a “benefit,” as if we never worked to earn every penny of it. Just because they “borrowed” the money, doesn't mean that our investments were a charity! Let’s take a stand.
We have earned our right to Social Security and Medicare. Demand that our legislators bring some sense into our government –
Find a way to keep Social Security and Medicare going, for the sake of that 92% of our population who need it.
Then call it what it is: Our Earned Retirement Income.
Without doing the math i am pretty sure u compounded the total contribution as a lump sum when in fact one needs to take each years contribution, multiply by 1% then add next years and compound the new sum by 1% for as many years as u wish.
1,3 million using 1% seems a stretch.
I do not mean to be unsympathetic. Indeed we as Americans are just beginning to realize the devastation wrought by unconstrained government. But facts are facts. And wishing things different cannot change the facts. And a failure to recognize and deal with the facts only prolongs the agony. Here are the facts.
To describe Social Security and Medicare as failed Ponzi Schemes is not exactly correct. Social Security and Medicare were very successful Ponzi Schemes ... for the perpetrators. Social Secutiry and Medicare are exposed Ponzi Schemes. And the victims are just now becoming aware of the deception.
The most difficult thing for the victim of a Ponzi Scheme or any other fraud to do is to come to grips with the fact that the money is gone! No entity can bring it back, least of all the government that stole it from you.
It is in fact extremely counter productive to do computations like you see in this post describing how much money one might have had had the Ponzi Scheme not been a Ponzi Scheme. This just invites the victim to continue to fall prey to the perpetrator. Or worse yet, seek recompense at the expense of others (which seems to be where we are headed).
America is currently in the thrall of an extremely dangerous demagogue. And sadly the opposition party is scant better. The only hope is for a majority of Americans to stop fretting over their lost money and start fretting over their lost Liberty. Let the process begin here.
ANYTHING the feds oversee is an “entitlement” by design - how else can they steal from those who contribute in order to give it to illegals?
Since when is 1% compounded monthly a meager or realistic interest rate, especially considering that you consider it to be risk free?
A realistic risk-free rate would be 3% per year, bringing your grand total to less than double the amount you’ve put into it—and a fraction of the ‘earned’ benefit you’re claiming.
I also pay income taxes on my Federal Benefit Payment. Do people pay taxes on their food stamps?
“You now get an entitlement check from the government, which will continue until they can’t pay it anymore. After that, you won’t get it anymore because we’ll be out of money.”
This would have been true if we were on the gold standard. In theory, if you’re on the gold standard you can’t print more money than can be backed up with gold at the legally set price. However, LBJ wanted to carry on the Viet Nam war and engage in the largest social program ever attempted. (Actually, it was a wealth redistribution scheme, but that’s a whole article.) To do this without raising taxes LBJ printed more money than the US had gold to back it at the then legally set price. Charles de Gaulle, then the head of France, realized LBJ had done this and he started buying dollars and converting them into gold. President Nixon took us off the gold standard to prevent de Gaulle from draining the national treasury. After that, with money no longer limited by the amount of gold you had the money supply growth became exponential. In 2008 Obama doubled the money supply and in 2009 he doubled it again. The government is currently creating 87 billion dollars per week.
One might ask, if the government can create money without taxation, why does Obama want to raise taxes? The answer is to remove wealth from private hands and put it exclusively in government hands and the hands of specially selected cronies.
Excellent summary!
Outstanding post. Spot on.
You can thank, LBJ. He wanted to use the money to fight the war on poverty. To lift the poor into the middle class so that they could be contributing members of society.
Now that they squandered the fund they decided that the SS insurance was really just a tax and the money they returned was an entitlement. Then they decided that the charity previously known as welfare was also an entitlement and lumped all the entitlements together.
Now it turns out they can't afford all these entitlements so they want to cut back on the social security/medicare portion but no mention of cutting back on the war on poverty portion.
Plunder & death...socialism & totalitarianism. Plunder built on the backs of dead Americans. Those who looted us should be dug up and given a proper hanging. Those living looters are roaming the halls of congress.
We need more dead Americans to fund it BUMP! (Obamacare)
Get me out of the FORCED debt/death matrix. Give me my money back. I’ll save for my own retirement and medical care. Myself and my family will determine how my last days are lived and they will not go into debt to extend my life unless they decide otherwise...and...
this side of America’s debt burden is eliminated and the rest of you and your children and grandchildren aren’t taxed/paying for it.
“It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.” - Bastiat 1801-1850
See the socialist time-bomb that will explode into totalitarian control at the time of their choosing...here...
“Socialism Is Legal Plunder” - Bastiat 1801-1850 (They have FORCED us into this mess)
BIG GOVERNMENT IS CRONY SOCIALISM
DEFUND DEFUSE DISMANTLE DEPOPULATE
Socialists/Totalitarians are useless eaters of our productivity
live - free - republic
Ditto! It’s always been a tax, no more, no less.
Fleming vs Nestor- (SS as a ‘social contract’)
=The Court ruled that no such contract exists, and that there is no contractual right to receive Social Security payments. Payments due under Social Security are not “property” rights and are not protected by the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The interest of a beneficiary of Social Security is protected only by the Due Process Clause. (wiki)
FICA is just another tax, that’s all.
Thank you. My Dad is just like this poster. I’ve pointed out that he didn’t pay the amount of TAX he claims he did AND he isn’t getting HIS money back, he’s getting his grandchildren’s money. Doesn’t hear it.
New tagline...
The funds weren’t confiscated willy nilly ~ they were accounted for.
Does that mean it is not too early to start shooting people????
The US government has assets ~ it can make good on all its obligations. This is NOT Greece!
“If you calculate the future value of your monthly investment in social security ($375/month, including both your and your employer’s contributions) at a meager 1% interest rate compounded monthly, after 40 years of working you’d have more than $1.3+ million dollars saved! This is your personal investment.”
You obviously didn’t read the bill before you passed it.
It’s a direct tax, property of the government to dispose of at will. This was ruled on by USSC more than 70 years ago, IIRC.
Any talk of savings or investment is just a silly lie.
The need for a reserve (off gold, silver, property) is a requirement for private issuers of currency. That used to be quite common.
SS is undeniably a ponzi scheme but your numbers need some revising.
The SS portion of the employment tax was 12.4% not 15%. 6.2% was taken from you (until recently) and 6.2% from your employer.
You cannot assume an “average” income and then calculate the SS taxes paid on this average. I would bet that nearly everyone earned considerably less 40 years ago. If you made $15,000 per year when you first started working in 1972 that was decent money but your total SS payment was only $1860 per year. Interest paid on the oldest money would have earned the most but the oldest money was also the smallest. Saying that income was steady at $30,000 per year makes the calculation easier but puts a disproportionate amount into SS in the early years and exagerates the interest calculation.
Your assumed rate of interest of 1% per year compounded monthly is much lower than the actual rate of return. This can be seen at: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/intRates.html
Although the entire SS scheme was based on the faulty assumption that the number of workers contributing to the scam would always greatly exceed the number drawing out money, another fatal reality is that retirees withdraw much more than they ever contributed even taking into account the interest paid on that money. And that was especially true for retirees in past decades. My grandfather would have contibuted very little before he retired and started receiving payments in the 1960’s.
SS will be “fixed” by means testing and raising the retirement ages. I’m 60 and I expect that the SS retirement age will move ahead just enough every few years so that I will stand little chance of getting a SS check before I die. But the SS problem will be fixed - if you call swindling a generation out of their savings a “fix”.
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