What is your opinion of Social Security? For those who don't know about it, let me give you a crash course. I'll try and be objective.
Social Security was developed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The idea was that it would provide for people in their old age. It was (supposedly) supposed to be self-sustaining. People pay into the system, get old, and get money out of the system. People pay in by paying a Social Security Tax. This tax is not applied to an individual account. It is a giant conglomerate of tax revenue. At retirement age (officially 65), people can collect their Social Security checks.
Now, objectivity aside, let me give you the problems facing Social Security.
1) Currently, Social Security and other such entitlements account for 40% of current expenditures. It's unsustainable spending.
2) People are getting more out than they put in. Thanks to medical innovation (which is thanks to capitalism, might I add), elderly people are living longer than they used to. This means more checks.
3) Fewer people are paying in. Declining birth rates mean we have a proportionally smaller amount of people finding Social Security.
Libertarians have a few strong opinions on Social Security. My [i]personal[/i] thought is that FDR truly believed that SS would be sustainable. He was mistaken, clearly. However, I think he also had some ulterior motives while implementing it.
Let me explain.
Anybody can see that Social Security is just state-ownership of retirement plans. An intelligent and inquisitive mind should wonder, "Why even implement it? It's just a massive savings account owned by the state. Can't individuals just save on their own?" Here's the catch, and I suspect that FDR planned this:
If I'm 50 years old, I've presumably put in approximately 30 years worth of SS taxes into SS. Now, if SS didn't exist, I'd have had all of that money in my 30 years of paychecks, instead. That money would go into a savings account, or it would be invested, or it would be converted into material wealth. In other words, I would own it, not the state. Imagine that I die. Does my family ever see any of that money? No. It becomes pure state revenue.
That's my suspicion of SS. It's a cheap way of generating a bit of cash for the state. It's definitely backfired, however.
What are [i]your[/i] thoughts on Social Security?
-
2 RepliesLet's play guess the social security number. First, we need someone to submit theirs to the pile.