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That's the great misconception and lie of Social Security. People think it's like a government run 401k, that you're "investing' in some retirement account every paycheck. That's not at all how it actually functions though. Social Security is two entirely independent things. First it's a benefits program like SNAPP or Medicaid. In that regard Congress votes every year on how much budget they're going to allocate towards paying people Social Security. Literally everyone receiving Social Security cheques in the following year are reliant on Congress deciding to allocate enough money to make sure those cheques don't bounce. Secondly it's an income tax. The two are not connected in any way. The amount of Social Security income tax that the federal government collects each year has absolutely no bearing on the amount of funding that Congress allocates for Social Security in the coming year.
Let that sink in.
Social Security is the world's biggest Ponzi scheme. Always has been. That's a huge part of why a lot of Republicans, particularly older ones (like ones around retirement age) are hand wringing about falling birth rates. Social Security always counted on the idea that there would be more people working and paying into Social Security than the number of people currently collecting Social Security. In a country with a positive population growth that would always be true. It ceases to be true the moment you have a negative population growth rate though.
No, it's a big insurance scheme, but its finances have been fucked with. The original intent was that the money went into a trust fund isolated from other government finances. It didn't take long for some scumbag to realize that the trust fund could be used as collateral for loans, or "lent" directly from the trust fund to other government activities.
Also, even if it's funded year-to-year, if the cap on contributions were lifted, the system could be self-funding, or nearly so. But the Republicans (and some conservative Democrats) have been trying to kill it since FDR started it, and the specious argument is always that it's not affordable.
The US in 1935 could afford it. The only difference now is a matter of priorities and who's in charge.
They cap it at 160k a year. So if you make 3m a year, you'll only pay on what is due on the 160k.
Getting rid of that, along with taxing the rich, would fix that problem. If 8 people have more wealth than like 4 billion people, it's really not a "we need more people to keep this ponzi scheme" problem, it's more of a France in the 1790s problem.
2025 cap 176,100
2026 cap 183,600
Interestingly, this is the first year that the congressional salary doesn't hit the cap
Social Security is not part of the normal budget. It and the social security tax are kept separate from everything else. Congress is not having to decide how much to find it with every year because it's cordoned off, and directly funded by it's relevant income tax. It has been pulling in a surplus, and has funds in reserve. The point where we begin drawing down that reserve is coming soon though, which is why it keeps making news.
I love when nonamericans storm in here acting like authorities on American things they very clearly aren't.
Listen to this folks, he's right. Even when the reserve runs out of money in about 10 years under the current structure, tax revenues will fund about 80% of benefits on an ongoing basis.
To everyone who says Social Security isn't sustainable: it's very sustainable. Just at around 80%.
To fund it at 100% long into the future they just need to raise the cap on taxable income.
Also! If it wages weren't so dismal, for so long, social security would not be having this issue at all.
We could fix social security by increasing the minimum wage to something that want an absolute joke without ever touching the Social Security laws directly.
Although the cap should be raised, too. It is laughably low.
The solution is so simple and painless that every American should be furious that SS is EVER used as a political football. Fuck the rich, raise the cap, from the bottom to the top.
Yes. Or just remove the cap entirely.
Lol, I'm American, you just can't spell. Cheque is the correct way to spell it, check is incorrect. You also don't know how SS actually functions. Congress has treated it like a slush fund for decades and constantly steals money from it. And yes it is a budget item that gets voted on like anything else. You might think it's an independent account, but that's just the way it's reported on the accounting forms, absolutely nothing is stopping Congress from taking those funds and spending them on whatever they want and in fact on many many occasions they've done exactly that.
Congress doesn't even need the revenue from any taxes to just spend whatever it wants. The US has been borrowing money to cover its budget for all but like 3 years of my life.
The few times they did explicitly borrow that money from the social security fund, they replaced it with Treasury bonds, which is a certified debt and accrue interest and not paying those back would remove Congress' ability to borrow any more money for probably decades. So no, they're not stealing that money - that has been a long time conspiracy theory that people who want to kill Soc Sec like to spread.
And no one in the US spells it like that, no.
The US doesn't need to borrow money as long as the USD remains the world's reserve currency.
Which is why we are completely fucking ourselves by burning all of the good will we've built up since WW2.
No, it DOES need to borrow money. Being the world reserve currency just let's it do so to an exceptional degree. It does this by selling Treasury bonds.
Read about Modern Monterey Theory.
It's all made up, and we print it. We can do whatever we want with it.
Or we could, before our own government started sabotaging our standing in the world.
Issuing bonds is the mechanism by which they do what you're saying. The US, by law, currently cannot just print more money to pay off it's debts. It can print money to buy bonds through the market in some convoluted nonsense, but that direct print to debt that your saying isn't a thing.
Cheque and check are two different things you're just uneducated. A check is the mark you make to select a box, while a cheque is the thing you write to transfer money from one bank account to another. They're different and yes people all over the US know the difference between the two.
I'm aware of what those using British English would argue. But no official documents (laws, forms, government regulations) in the US use that spelling. It's check here.
Claiming someone else is uneducated because they're not being an uppity contrarian to how every single official source in the entire country spells something...is just stupid.
It's been this way since Webster out out his 1806 dictionary. Go argue with him about it.
Pot, meet kettle.
Treated it like a slush fund? How? It’s time to stop taking what your racist uncle tells you at Thanksgiving as the truth.
And yet they can't stand immigration. Well, anything other than waspy-white immigration.
It's not a fucking ponzi scheme
This comment is so stupid I wouldn't know where to start to unpack it. This is such a bad take on so many levels it makes Sovereign citizens sound like supreme court justices.
I mean when it was first introduced it ran at a surplus and did its job. Now it keeps being raided by the parasites/rich.
No money from the social security fund has been stolen. Any money that has been previously borrowed was replaced with Treasury bonds. Effectively an IOU that accrues interest.