I paid into Soc Sec starting at the age of 15.
I was self-employed for over 30 years & paid both halves of the required amounts into Soc Sec.
I am now over 70.
Telling me that all that money is now a welfare payment is just plain insulting.
If I had it in a 401 K for all those years & it had been invested. My Soc Sec would not be frozen at the rate it is now.
Most of us cannot work full time anymore, because employers want 20-30 Y/o ‘workers’.
My experience doesn’t count anymore unless I am called to straighten out the bookkeeping that some twerp with no experience messed up. They got paid $25 an hour, with full benefits to screw it up. I get paid $20 an hour with NO Benefits to fix it.
I’ve been self-employed for decades and thus have been paying both sides too.
The simple reality is that many of your cohorts and elders have been taking out benefits that far exceed what they’ve put in for both SS and Medicare. I know my parents certainly have. The good news is that they’ve been healthy and long-lived enough to partake of it. And, it has been there for many a medical issue.
But in practicality that was just taxes you were paying. For many, the same goes for garden variety taxes: they’d have got more benefit from the payments if they’d been allowed to keep and invest them for themselves.