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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (209624)	11/27/2012 3:02:52 PM
From: KyrosL	Respond to of 544013

Sure, if you die before collecting you are out of luck. But that is not much different than many private defined benefit pensions. Moreover, SS has rather generous survivor benefits that in many ways are superior to private pension schemes. As to whether you, personally, will collect and how much, that's a different question having to do with the fact that the SS Trust Fund will be soon broke, since it has been used to fund the government rather than as a true pension fund as other countries are doing (Australia comes to mind). But this is a flaw of our politicians and our political system. At this point, the only way to fix this is to adjust benefits sufficiently so that income and outflow balance over the foreseeable future. But even if it is not fixed the worst that will happen to your benefits (if you are fairly young) is that they will be reduced to approximately 75% of current benefits, inflation adjusted. This is what actuaries say will result in a solvent system, at least for this century. I can appreciate your feeling that as an investment SS is not very good for people that contribute reasonably large amounts and especially those that contribute near the maximum. These are the people that eventually get less than they contribute, precisely because of the welfare aspects built into the system -- i.e. relatively generous pensions for very low contributors, survivor benefits, and disability benefits.