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<\/a>\u2026 It\u2019s not a pension fund into which you put your money when you are young and from which you draw when you are old. It\u2019s an immediate transfer from workers today to retirees today. That\u2019s what it has always been and that\u2019s what it has to be \u2013 there is no other possible way for it to work.<\/p>\n\u2026 This is how Social Security actually operates. As you can see, this needs no prior financing or savings, nor would that appear to be particularly helpful. At the national level, maintaining a class of retirees (whether via Social Security or private pensions) means redistributing existing output, not putting money under your mattress. Although you<\/em> can run out of money for retirement, we, as a nation, cannot.<\/p>\nWhat, then, you may ask, is the Social Security Trust Fund, the pool of money that people say will dry up and make it impossible for anyone to receive their Social Security payments? It is the surplus that resulted from having collected more in taxes than was necessary to pay out to retirees. Let me say that again: it is how much existing workers were overtaxed relative to the need to pay retirees in the past. It was never the source of the money we\u2019ve been paying to Social Security recipients all these years. Strictly speaking, it\u2019s completely unnecessary if we are able to precisely and continuously match tax revenues and pay outs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Yes. Please remember this: Anyone who tells you that Social Security is \u201cgoing broke\u201d is either lying to you<\/em> or, at best, does not have the first clue how Social Security works<\/em>.<\/p>\nSocial Security is not going broke. Social Security cannot<\/em> go broke.<\/p>\nIt is not an account that can be depleted, it is an arrangement between generations. As long as there are<\/em> generations, then Social Security will continue to exist.<\/p>\nThere is no debt or deficit that can interfere with that arrangement. The arrangement, like any promise, can be deliberately broken, but it cannot go broke.<\/p>\n
Only two scenarios can be imagined to make Social Security stop working:<\/p>\n
1.<\/strong> Our grandchildren all turn out to be selfish assholes and oath-breakers, deciding en masse<\/em> to screw over their retired parents and grandparents while also being so short-sighted as to invite their own children and grandchildren to screw them<\/em> over in turn upon their<\/em> retirement. If all<\/em> of our children turn out to be evil and stupid, then Social Security will not be sustainable. But then if all of our children turn out to be evil and stupid, nothing else will be sustainable either.<\/p>\n2.<\/strong> Some kind of science-fiction, P.D. James, Children-of-Men<\/em> scenario in which the human race mysteriously becomes incapable of reproducing. That would mean no future generation of workers to pay for Social Security benefits, and thus would entail the end of Social Security. But since it would also entail the end of everything else,<\/em> including the human race itself, it\u2019s hard to view such a potential problem as a flaw in the design of Social Security.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“It\u2019s not a pension fund into which you put your money when you are young and from which you draw when you are old. It\u2019s an immediate transfer from workers today to retirees today. That\u2019s what it has always been.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[58],"class_list":["post-13243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-warfare","tag-greed"],"yoast_head":"\n
Social Security is not "going broke" because Social Security cannot go broke<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\""It\u2019s not a pension fund into which you put your money when you are young and from which you draw when you are old. It\u2019s an immediate transfer from workers today to retirees today. 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