I am sorry but you don't have a clue about SS and how it operates. This is a report by the Medicare and SS Trustees. They have both government and public members.
The Board of Trustees is comprised of six members. Four serve by virtue of their positions with the federal government: Jacob J. Lew, Secretary of the Treasury and Managing Trustee; Carolyn W. Colvin, Acting Commissioner of Social Security; Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services; and Seth D. Harris, Acting Secretary of Labor. The two public trustees are Charles P. Blahous, III and Robert D. Reischauer.
The public members provide non-partisan review of the programs. I met one such former member, Tom Savings, who served a long time on the Board. They use accepted actuarial standards. They have been remarkably accurate in their projections over the years.
They claim they are living off ‘interest’ which is laughable since the interest they are talking about is the rate of expansion of the debt, not appreciation of any tangible asset. Every penny of that interest is money that will have to be taken away from other budget items, so basically they’re saying that all the other entitlement programs will be reduced and discretionary spending will be wiped out, but we’ll keep printing those monthly checks.
LOL. No, they are talking about the interest payments associated with the $2.4 trillion in T-bills in the SS Trust Fund. The USG is required to pay interest on these T-bills just as much as they must do the same for those held by the Chinese. Under the law governing SS, the benefits paid out by SS will be reduced once the fund (including interest) is exhausted. Then, by law, the amount of benefits paid will be circumscribed by the amount of payroll taxes collected. Hence, if SS is not reformed, it will go bust in 2033 or thereabouts. The SS DI trust fund runs out of money in 2016.
They also assume that life expectancy will not rise. By 2085 it would not surprise me to see one worker for every retiree, so good luck with pay as you go. Or maybe that’s what the Death Panels are designed to prevent.
Here is the documentation for the methodology for the long term projections
Here is the methodology Here are the short term projection methodology and assumptions.
We are on a glide path to collapse, and there is no fuel in the tanks to pull out of it. Barring a breakthrough in cheap energy to change the paradigm, the collapse will happen in our lifetimes.
That is assuming no changes will be made. There will be. Paul Ryan is already talking about means testing SS. The program will implode if no changes are made, which is why the politicians will be forced to make them. Politicians need a crisis before they will act. We have known for a very long time that these programs are unsustainable. The Trustees have been documenting it every year if you ever read their reports.
Even assuming you are correct, Social Security provides a lesser benefit for future workers at a higher tax rate, which means that it is theft from young or unborn future workers to provide an indefensible payment level to current and near term retirees.
I said it was a Ponzi scheme. Do you understand how a Ponzi scheme operates?
You should be ashamed of yourself for even suggesting a nation founded on the idea of equal protection under the laws should give you a benefit that is stolen from your posterity.
Ashamed of what? I said that these programs are so imbedded into the social fabric of this country that they will never be repealed. They are unsustainable as currently structured and must be reformed.
Do you consider the progressive income tax to be equal protection under the law? You are naive if you don't understand that we are well down the road to socialism. The federal government controls 25% of the GDP and all government--federal, state, and local--controls 45% of GDP. Wealth is being redistributed on a gargantuan scale and the government is doing the redistributing. We just added another huge entitlement program--Obamacare. Bush 43 added the prescription drug program, which represents a $7.3 trillion unfunded liability.
There is no Trust Fund and there never was. It consists of pieces of paper denominating money spent long ago. These pieces of paper are not magic, they are not capable of generating revenue. You have somehow managed to convince yourself that these IOUs are an asset, when the fact is Social Security would operate exactly the same if those pieces of paper were never printed.
All benefits payments are made from the General Fund. Always have been, always will be. All FICA taxes collected have always gone into the General Fund, always have, always will. You could use those really fancy pieces of paper to record the payments, or use a spreadsheet on a PC, it doesn’t make any difference, the money follows the exact same path.
How accurate were your magic Trustees at predicting a lost decade of economic stagnation? How can you trust that their crystal ball is correct that 2018 is the year the US economy magically starts to grow, when all Economic growth for the past 5 years has been less than the borrowed money added to the National Debt. But, again, none of that matters because the Trustees are making calculations based on magic paper.
Ponzi schemes collapse, you admitted that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, and you say it must be reformed. Yet in effect you stated earlier that one solution is to make it a bigger Ponzi scheme by feeding more money into it.
The progressive income tax is unconstitutional. It is well documented that the 16th amendment was never properly ratified by a sufficient number of States, and the US Government has been lawlessly funded for over 100 years. Are you trying to convince me how good it is since it’s deeply ingrained in society?
We are not well down the road to Socialism, we have been there since the 1930s. We are well down the road to the consequences of socialism, which is collapse. I find it difficult from reading your closing paragraph to tell whether you are for or against it.