Nice of you to lecture me on common knowledge. I understand present and future value of money.
However you’re assuming a lot of things. You’re assuing the government gives a damn about it when they have to pay out. I can assure you they don’t.
Your assumption also predicates that Social Security is some flavor of investment such as an annuity. It is not. It is a wealth transfer program. It always has been, and always will be. Watching people get on a high horse defending wealth transfer (from the present taxpayers to the past ones) by calling detractors ‘Marxists’ is the height of irony (not to say you did, but it’s pretty common so far in this thread).
But to get back to a rather important point which has been stated umpteen times, it doesn’t make any difference what you imagine the government owes you, or exactly how you might imagine your ‘contribution’ to be calculated, there is no money. There is only a claim on future taxpayers, and that claim will be appreciably worse than the claim that was on you.
I will acknowledge that you have been wronged. I’ve always thought Social Security was criminal. I’d love to see it killed right now. However we both know that won’t happen. Thus we are left with figuring out how to mitigate the mess we have.
I’m getting tired of restating why I favor means testing, and I don’t need to say again that I’m not in favor because of class warfare. It doesn’t matter if I do since someone will label me a Marxist anyway.
Then start acting and writing like you do so, rather than pretending otherwise.
However you’re assuming a lot of things.
I didn't assume a thing. I used the government's own publication of historical long-term Treasury bond rates:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h15/data/Annual/H15_TCMNOM_Y30.txt
[That's just one of my sources for the rates back to 1962, but you get the idea]
The special US treasury bonds in the "trust fund" have effectively the same yield. So, it's not unreasonable to use them to calculate the present value of a past stream of Social Security contributions.
You’re assuing the government gives a damn about it when they have to pay out.
In the posting that you replied to, I was pointing out the errors in someone's calculations about the value of their past contributions. Anything else that you attributed to that posting was a figment of your imagination. So, f*** off.
I’m getting tired of restating why I favor means testing, and I don’t need to say again that I’m not in favor because of class warfare.
I don't care how you try to rationalize it, means testing is class warfare.
If you want to reduce benefits across the board, you have my 100% of my support. But, if you advocate targeting a subset "because they can afford it", you're nothing more than an armed robber, who has been pointing the federal government's gun at me for the past 40 years.