Lol Bro doesn't know what a Ponzi Scheme is
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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The entire stock market is basically a ponzi scheme.
Push pensions, 401k, 529, HSA money into one spot and then rug the whole market every few years.
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Okay crypto-fascist whatever you say
Says the guy who made most of his fortune on taxpayer money and hype.
Should have listened to Al Gore: Lockbox
What a different world we would be in if Florida didn't fuck up in 2000
What a different world we would be in if ~~Florida didn't fuck up in 2000~~ jeb bush and the Supreme Court didn't steal the election in 2000
heck we would be better off vis a vis climate change if we made the push towards nuclear George HW Bush made in 1988. Doing nothing was the worst choice.
Had FL simply not allowed Jeb to chair the committee to elect his brother in FL…
claiming it’s unsustainable due to long-term obligations exceeding tax revenue.
Dude literally took over the system that allows the government to create money out of thin air, tellin us the government’s gonna run out of money.
Also, your fake department is named after the first meme coin. Which you tried to pump-and-dump on live TV. Ponzi-scheming motherfucker.
Didnt Reagan under a conservative government allow the money to be spent, in order to pay for the debt left over after the great society act?
It therefore would now be a ponzi scheme, where past investors pay new investors, until the outflows outpace inflows and it fails.
No, what happened during the Reagan administration is that the government recognized that decades in the future, the predicted change in the age pyramid would mean more retirees and fewer workers to support them. So rather than slightly increasing SS taxes in the future to cover this, they started increasing SS taxes immediately and investing that overpayment in Treasury bonds (this is the origin of the Social Security "trust fund" which is routinely misrepresented as the entirely of the SS system). This SS trust fund money is primarily what allowed Reagan to run enormous deficits ("fiscal conservative" lol) without causing interest rates to spiral out of control.
There is absolutely nothing about Social Security which is in any way like a Ponzi scheme. It is simply a pension plan applied to the whole country instead of just an individual company.
Ah interesting, thanks for the correction. Though since treasuries are paid by the government is it not then still a ponzi scheme, in the fact the bonds must be redeemed to pay for shortfalls, in which case the government must tax the existing population to pay for the redeemed bond to fund the old?
If we are looking at our existing scenario with the baby boomers I'd assume we must be close to being forced to liquidate, and taxes will rise on the young for the bond repayment?
If they allowed people to opt out would it not be the case that as people opt out you'd need to raise taxes on the young as more people opted out, since none of the money actually still exists, cascading into an insolvent system just like how a standard ponzi scheme unwinds?
Just forget about the "trust fund" because as I mentioned, it's not central to the way the SS system works. Social Security is simply a system whereby a large base of workers pays taxes to fund the (modest) retirement of a much smaller number of retirees. These are rough numbers, but: the average man starts work at age 21 and retires at age 65 (meaning he pays into the system for 44 years); the average male retiree then dies at age 76 (meaning he collects SS benefits for 11 years). So on average, four workers pay SS taxes to support one retiree. The average SS benefit is $1,583 per month, which means the average worker needs to pay just $396 per month in SS taxes for the system to remain solvent indefinitely. The median annual salary in the US is $59,384 (or $4949 per month) which means the SS tax rate only needs to be 8% (it's currently 6.2% because the trust fund is being dipped into). Any shortfall could be easily made good by 1) raising the tax rate, and/or 2) raising the cap on taxable income.
This is why the "Ponzi scheme SS" meme is bullshit. A Ponzi scheme provides fake returns to investors by returning part of the money invested by new suckers; as soon as you run out of new suckers, the scheme collapses. Social Security does not in any way rely on perpetually finding new suckers, it only relies on the demographic reality of human beings having a much longer working life than retired life.
Though since treasuries are paid by the government is it not then still a ponzi scheme,
No, social security is investing in treasuries just like any other retirement fund might
in the fact the bonds must be redeemed to pay for shortfalls, in which case the government must tax the existing population
Well yeah, kind of. The government issues bonds to finance its debt. Some amount of that is a good thing, to fund large projects. However a poorly run government running a constantly increasing deficit and funding a constantly increasing debt with constantly increasing bonds is mortgaging its future to pay for its present. Think of the analogy of living off your credit cards. At some point you’ll hit a limit, everything comes due and you’re going to have a very bad time.
This is poor governance, regardless of who is buying the bonds. It has nothing to do with social security.
This is also why the idea of a smaller government is so compelling: we need to do something about ever increasing debt. However the political party that talks most about that is the one most responsible for that debt. You don’t reduce debt by more and more tax cuts for the wealthy nor ever increasing military.
There had been the expectation by some that our debt doesn’t matter as long as the dollar acts as the world’s reserve currency, but what happens when this stops? What happens when chaos spite and narcissism disrupts global trade and alliances, driving other countries away from trade with US, away from the dollar as an exchange currency? What happens when those countries no longer buy the enormous amounts of US Bonds they have been and no longer find our debt? And Social Security is at an inflection where it needs to pay out more than it’s bringing in do starts selling the bonds it’s invested in? We might be in for a very bad time, decades of government mismanagement under taxing the wealthy and overspending coming due at once, triggered by the idiot we voted for
What an idiot. Tons of rich people know that social security is a riot tax (it's not but that's how they see it).
@MicroWave Ponzi schemes by their nature are short-lived; According to Wikipedia, Charles Ponzi's original scheme ran just over a year before collapsing. All pyramid schemes require a pool of investors that is constantly expanding, which is not the situation with Social Security.
This is pseudo-science. There's nothing in the "nature" of ponzi schemes that makes them "short-lived", because these terms are subjective and unscientific. Many ponzi schemes have lasted for much longer than the original. See also global capitalism.
With social security, the pool of investors is the entire country's population. This large size and government backing stabilises it. But the financials still rely on continuous population growth, forever, to work well.
The key financial metric in social security is the ratio of pay-ins to pay-outs. For example, it could be 5 paying employees for every retiree. The social security scheme has some minimum, critical ratio that is needed to maintain the tax rates and benefit levels. And if that minimum is, say, 5:1 workers to older retirees, that implies a population in a state of exponential demographic growth.
Right now, the US is propping up its lack of organic demographic growth with immigration, and accumulated trust fund savings from an earlier era. Japan had massive problems with its social security when its population stagnated.
Notice, however, that the government of Japan did not just implode like a securities fraud. This is because governments are fundamentally not like private sector criminals running Ponzi schemes.
And if that minimum is, say, 5:1 workers to older retirees, that implies a population in a state of exponential demographic growth.
Well, not necessarily; it relies on the average person working for 5x as long as they spend retired. If we start working at 20, and retire at 65, and the ratio is 5:1, then it allows for an average of 9 years of retirement per person before we die. The problem is that now people are living a lot longer than they were in the 1920s, which is why there's been discussion if raising the benefits age to 70. This would allow for 10 years of benefits, taking us to an average lifespan of 80 (which happens to be just about what the average lifespan in the US actually is.)
If the population is stagnant, but the age distribution remains steady, this would let the system self-sustain. It becomes problematic when there's a higher ratio of retirees to people just entering the workforce, though.
The more news I read the more I think of judge dredd as the future for the USA.
Corporate Takeover of Government
Elon Musk and DOGE and the budget cuts, like a megacorp executive running essential public services for profit.
Trump & Musk pushing privatization, bust like how corporations in Judge Dredd control everything from housing to law enforcement.
Weakening Social Safety Nets
Cutting Social Security, making healthcare deniable based on religious beliefs (Arkansas bill), reducing government services looks like pushing society toward a survival-of-the-fittest model to me.
The rich live in luxury, while everyone else is left to fend for themselves like the division in Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One.
Authoritarianism & the Rule of the Few
Trump’s policies, Vance’s ideology, Musk’s influence, the US is shifting toward rule by billionaires and strongmen, bypassing democratic institutions.
The Rise of Private Justice & Armed Control
Musk’s obsession with tech-based policing & surveillance (like Neuralink, AI, and robot enforcement) eerily mirrors corporate-controlled law enforcement in dystopian fiction.
And worst of all, Rob Schneider is there.
Lol moron doesn't know what a Ponzi Scheme is.
Hang on... I... I have an idea. 😈
you would know
Who?
Oh he is surely referring to our reliance on perpetual population growth and being the genius he is, I’m sure he has the solution of how to fund it with a shrinking population.
/s
Well he does have a large part of the solution. Not in his mind, in his hoard. End the payment limit, take the tax percentages back to the Reagan years, and he and the other billionaires would be funding it without breaking a sweat.
Fuck you, Incel King. Go eat your own shit and die.