I’m sure this is no consolation, but as a born-and-raised citizen who has paid into social security for 15 years now, I have serious doubts about seeing a positive return on those taxes myself.

>I’m sure this is no consolation, but as a born-and-raised citizen who has paid into social security for 15 years now, I have serious doubts about seeing a positive return on those taxes myself.

Look at the bright side though: You get a chance to get conscripted for a war against Iran/Russia/China and also get to blow up windowless mudhouses in the desert to protect democracy and freedom back in the states.

Social security also kinda feels like a Ponzi scheme. Use current ‘investors’ money to pay for retired people.

If only they just used the current 'investors' money to pay the retirees. They actually use the social security taxes to pay for "whatever" and hope they can come up with the rest when they need it.

If you were paying retired people with investors money then why does SSA have a giant surplus of nearly 3 trillion [1]?

The surplus is because of all the people that have payed into the program and haven't retired yet ...

[1]: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/assets.html

That's not how social security works. You're not supposed to get a positive return. You directly pay a basic income to retired people (minus administration costs). When you retire, workers pay a basic income to you.

This is how it works, but it is not how it was sold (and all the "work tracking" confuses people as to what it is doing).

The issue is that, for me and anyone else who reaches retirement age after 2034, only about 80% of that basic income will be available. For reasons I'm not super clear on, this idea tends to get coded as a conspiracy theory in many circles, despite being uncontroversially true and widely reported on.

That's a perennial Boogeyman. Policymakers have a wide array of tweaks they could make (from adjusting the cap to adjusting retirement age) at any time that could push that out by another century. https://www.epi.org/blog/a-record-share-of-earnings-was-not-...

I'm pretty sure they understand how social security works. You missed the point they were making.

Asking for a positive return on social security is like asking for a positive return on welfare. The positive return comes from not having so many homeless old people all over the country. It's not a personal investment vehicle.

It could be that OP expects Social Security to be kaput by the time he gets to be old.

Looking at the population graph, that’s a valid concern. There’s a ton of boomers and a ton of millenials, but very few babies to pay for our retirement.

(This phenomenon could invalidate even individual stock investment retirement plans as well. We need a future generation of workers, investors, entrepreneurs, consumers).

> This phenomenon could invalidate even individual stock investment retirement plans as well.

It has always baffled me how nobody ever takes this into account for investments.