4 ms·

Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme?

15 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jm4rc05 2y ago
Or imagine if you have to pay your parents for care and education.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  You are implying that Social Security actually is sustainable which it isn't. The payments that parents of tomorrow will get will be abysmal at best, so yes, their children will likely have to support them directly. To me it points to deeper issues of the use of a fairly inflationary currency. There is no lasting governmental fix to be expected because governments inevitably always dilute their currency.
  - yawpitch 2y ago
    You are stating that Social Security isn’t sustainable, when in fact its sustainability depends in its entirety on demographic trends, workforce behaviors, and market conditions that cannot be accurately predicted. The imminent collapse of Social Security has been just ahead of us for roughly as long as fusion energy and flying cars have been… while I agree it’s unstable, it’s been sustainable thus far and the imminent tipping point keeps being slightly further off than predicted by everyone with an opinion.
    - smitty1e 2y ago
      So, it sounds as though the recommendation is to carry on until the collision with Stein's Law? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein
      - yawpitch 2y ago
        Stein was an economist, and effectively nothing that an economist states can ever result in anything reliable enough to be called a (capital L) Law. In this case, Stein’s Not-Very-Well-Reasoned-Aphorism conflicts with the Halting Problem, which has formally proven that it’s impossible to know if any given computational process halts once it’s begun. Social Security is, inherently, a computational process. Moreover, it’s a process the source code of which can be changed (and has been changed) during its runtime… we can’t assume it’s unsustainable except given other conditions that are all three of dynamic, stochastic, and unpredictable.
    - jfengel 2y ago
      The date for the collapse of Social Security has always been the same: the early 2030s. We do have a pretty good idea of what the demographic trends are: a baby boom, followed by a baby bust. That was why we moved from Social Security as a pay-as-you-go program to having a Trust Fund. We knew when the Trust Fund would top out, with more money going out than coming in (i.e. right about now), and how long it would take to deplete (i.e. roughly a decade). Life spans have not radically increased. They have slightly decreased, extending the fund a couple of years. But it's actually the least of our problems. That "trust fund" isn't a pile of money. It's just Treasury Bills. The government "borrowed" the money, and is now having to pay it back. That means we're going to have to either cut the budget dramatically, raise taxes, or borrow from somebody who will give us a worse interest rate than... uh, ourselves. So indeed, the ~2034 date for the Social Security failure is something of a red herring. But only because it's actually worse than that.
      - tzs 2y ago
        Making the payroll tax apply to wages beyond $176,100/year would greatly extend the life of the trust fund which should allow getting past the death of most of the last baby boom.
        dragonwriter 2y ago
        Lifting the cap, converting the tax from a payroll to a general income (including capital gains) tax (and therefore also including other income in benefit calculations), and adding several additional bend points rather than capping benefits would stabilize the fund forever, while broadening the kind of income generating activities people could rely on while benefiting from the safety net retirement system. But simply uncapping the tax without other reforms is probably the easiest short-run solution.
        s1artibartfast 2y ago
        How is that better than just funding it from the general fund as a welfare wealth transfer? from the political perspective, I suppose there is a pretext/misconception that social security is self funded on an individual basis, when payments are already extremely progressive, with higher earners subsidizing the low. The high bend point already diminishes additional benefit for additional contribution nearly to zero. Someone's last 50k of SS taxable income is already returning only 20% of their first 50K of SS taxable income. More specifically, below the first bend point, recipients get 90% of their average taxed income. After the last bend point, they are getting 15% of their marginal taxed income . 15% doesn't leave much room for additional reduction bend points.
m0llusk 2y ago
Decrepit old people piling up unwanted turned out to be a bummer as well as a sanitation problem, so framed that way Social Security is more of a subsidized litter control program. Thinking practically about problems instead of putting perceived fairness first yields dramatically different analysis.
- thowaway7564902 2y ago
  [dead]
Farfignoggen 2y ago
Since 1980 the Republican controlled houses of congress have intentionally not raised the Worker Soc Sec Retirement withholding amounts so as to not have to properly increase SS-Benefits to cover inflation! And it was not because the Republicans actually cared about the workers themselves as the Republicans were more focused on keeping the Low Wage industries' in the US matching Employer Soc Sec withholdings as low as possible. An so wee have had an intentionally undefended SS-Retirement fund the last 40+ years of the Republican controlled congress, that mostly had the Republican Congressional Majority overlapping many Democrat Controlled executive office tenures! And so Social Security does not work By Republican Party Anti New Deal design, before and especially since 1980! The Social Security 2100 act needs to get passed so that no low wage retiree gets a SS-Retirement check that's below 100% of the federal poverty level and that Republican Tax Cut for the most wealthy and Corporations in the US needs to be allowed to elapse to pay for that. And really the Corporate Tax Rates in the US needs to be returned to the same levels that they where when Eisenhower was POTUS and to fix the 40+ years of Republican Party intentional underestimating the proper SS-Withholding amount to properly fund Social Security!
tzs 2y ago
The article quotes Paul Samuelson: > The beauty of social insurance is that it is actuarially unsound. Everyone who reaches retirement age is given benefit privileges that far exceed anything he has paid in — exceed his payments by more than ten times (or five times counting employer payments)! I checked this using my work history. I download my wage history from ssa.gov, downloaded the payroll tax history from somewhere, and download one year T-bill rates over my working lifetime so far. It turns out that if the payments from me and my employer had been used to buy one year T-bills, and when those matured they had been rolled over into new one year T-bills, the amount that would be there now would be enough to pay my SS benefit if I started collecting now (2 years before full retirement age) for around 17 years, which happens to be around the life expectancy of a male my age. That's assume the T-bills stop rolling when I start collecting and so there is an uninvested lump sum of cash. Keep rolling over to new T-bills and it can cover several years beyond my life expectancy. That suggests that at least for workers with salary history similar to mine you could actually have a sound system--we are contributing enough that it should be possible to cover our benefits. I'm pretty sure this is just a coincidence. People who made more than me would also likely find results similar to mine, but people making substantially less would probably find their benefit exceeds what their contribution could cover. That's because your monthly SS benefit depends on what your "averaged index monthly earning" (AIME). That's the average you earned a month during your 35 highest earning years with each year indexed to current dollars. The method to go from AIME to monthly benefit amount looks like this (with the specific numbers depending on what you you become eligible to start receiving benefits): 90% of the first $1000 of your AIME + 32% of the AIME over than but less than $6000 + 15% of the AIME at or above $6000 E.g., someone whose AIME is $1k would get $900/month. Some with $10k AIME would get $3100/month. The second person would have contributed 10x as much but only have a benefit 3.4x as much.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  The 1 year return rates oscillate around 0% return when adjusted for inflation, 10 year treasuries average around 1% return when adjusted for inflation. SS as a system is basically break even, returning the same amount of money adjusted for inflation. This is obfuscated by the fact it also redistributes that money and population dynamics. https://www.longtermtrends.net/real-interest-rate/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/real-interest-rate/
readthenotes1 2y ago
"Social Security is not necessarily a Ponzi scheme" except the way the USA managed it.
throw0101a 2y ago
Related: the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) was also a PAYGO system and was reformed in the late 1990s: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Pension_Plan#1998_reforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Pension_Plan#1998_refor... A good book on how it happened is Fixing the Future by Bruce Little: > While the deficit battles have been recounted many times, the story of the reform that rescued the CPP has gone almost entirely untold. In Fixing the Future, Bruce Little explains the CPP overhaul and shows why it stands as one of Canada's most significant public policy success stories, in part because it demanded an almost unparalleled degree of federal-provincial co-operation. Providing an overview of the CPP's entire history from its beginning in 1965, Little pulls together published, and new unpublished, material relating to the CPP reform, and interviews over fifty politicians, government officials, and others who were deeply involved in the reforms for their recollections, insights, and observations. * https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9780802095831 https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9780802095831 It is now a hybrid systems: some component of benefits are PAYGO, but a portion are invested in capital markets (and private equity, by owning things like ports and highways). The investment component is run by an arms-length entity with board members being appointed by the feds and provinces: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPP_Investments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPP_Investments There were further reforms in 2017. Fun fact: it's actually harder to amend the CPP Act than the Canadian Constiution.

15 points by surprisetalk 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jm4rc05 2y ago

Or imagine if you have to pay your parents for care and education.

OutOfHere 2y ago
You are implying that Social Security actually is sustainable which it isn't. The payments that parents of tomorrow will get will be abysmal at best, so yes, their children will likely have to support them directly. To me it points to deeper issues of the use of a fairly inflationary currency. There is no lasting governmental fix to be expected because governments inevitably always dilute their currency.
- yawpitch 2y ago
  You are stating that Social Security isn’t sustainable, when in fact its sustainability depends in its entirety on demographic trends, workforce behaviors, and market conditions that cannot be accurately predicted. The imminent collapse of Social Security has been just ahead of us for roughly as long as fusion energy and flying cars have been… while I agree it’s unstable, it’s been sustainable thus far and the imminent tipping point keeps being slightly further off than predicted by everyone with an opinion.
  - smitty1e 2y ago
    So, it sounds as though the recommendation is to carry on until the collision with Stein's Law? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein
    - yawpitch 2y ago
      Stein was an economist, and effectively nothing that an economist states can ever result in anything reliable enough to be called a (capital L) Law. In this case, Stein’s Not-Very-Well-Reasoned-Aphorism conflicts with the Halting Problem, which has formally proven that it’s impossible to know if any given computational process halts once it’s begun. Social Security is, inherently, a computational process. Moreover, it’s a process the source code of which can be changed (and has been changed) during its runtime… we can’t assume it’s unsustainable except given other conditions that are all three of dynamic, stochastic, and unpredictable.
  - jfengel 2y ago
    The date for the collapse of Social Security has always been the same: the early 2030s. We do have a pretty good idea of what the demographic trends are: a baby boom, followed by a baby bust. That was why we moved from Social Security as a pay-as-you-go program to having a Trust Fund. We knew when the Trust Fund would top out, with more money going out than coming in (i.e. right about now), and how long it would take to deplete (i.e. roughly a decade). Life spans have not radically increased. They have slightly decreased, extending the fund a couple of years. But it's actually the least of our problems. That "trust fund" isn't a pile of money. It's just Treasury Bills. The government "borrowed" the money, and is now having to pay it back. That means we're going to have to either cut the budget dramatically, raise taxes, or borrow from somebody who will give us a worse interest rate than... uh, ourselves. So indeed, the ~2034 date for the Social Security failure is something of a red herring. But only because it's actually worse than that.
    - tzs 2y ago
      Making the payroll tax apply to wages beyond $176,100/year would greatly extend the life of the trust fund which should allow getting past the death of most of the last baby boom.
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
        Lifting the cap, converting the tax from a payroll to a general income (including capital gains) tax (and therefore also including other income in benefit calculations), and adding several additional bend points rather than capping benefits would stabilize the fund forever, while broadening the kind of income generating activities people could rely on while benefiting from the safety net retirement system. But simply uncapping the tax without other reforms is probably the easiest short-run solution.
        s1artibartfast 2y ago
        How is that better than just funding it from the general fund as a welfare wealth transfer? from the political perspective, I suppose there is a pretext/misconception that social security is self funded on an individual basis, when payments are already extremely progressive, with higher earners subsidizing the low. The high bend point already diminishes additional benefit for additional contribution nearly to zero. Someone's last 50k of SS taxable income is already returning only 20% of their first 50K of SS taxable income. More specifically, below the first bend point, recipients get 90% of their average taxed income. After the last bend point, they are getting 15% of their marginal taxed income . 15% doesn't leave much room for additional reduction bend points.

m0llusk 2y ago

Decrepit old people piling up unwanted turned out to be a bummer as well as a sanitation problem, so framed that way Social Security is more of a subsidized litter control program. Thinking practically about problems instead of putting perceived fairness first yields dramatically different analysis.

thowaway7564902 2y ago
[dead]

Farfignoggen 2y ago

Since 1980 the Republican controlled houses of congress have intentionally not raised the Worker Soc Sec Retirement withholding amounts so as to not have to properly increase SS-Benefits to cover inflation! And it was not because the Republicans actually cared about the workers themselves as the Republicans were more focused on keeping the Low Wage industries' in the US matching Employer Soc Sec withholdings as low as possible. An so wee have had an intentionally undefended SS-Retirement fund the last 40+ years of the Republican controlled congress, that mostly had the Republican Congressional Majority overlapping many Democrat Controlled executive office tenures! And so Social Security does not work By Republican Party Anti New Deal design, before and especially since 1980! The Social Security 2100 act needs to get passed so that no low wage retiree gets a SS-Retirement check that's below 100% of the federal poverty level and that Republican Tax Cut for the most wealthy and Corporations in the US needs to be allowed to elapse to pay for that. And really the Corporate Tax Rates in the US needs to be returned to the same levels that they where when Eisenhower was POTUS and to fix the 40+ years of Republican Party intentional underestimating the proper SS-Withholding amount to properly fund Social Security!

tzs 2y ago

The article quotes Paul Samuelson: > The beauty of social insurance is that it is actuarially unsound. Everyone who reaches retirement age is given benefit privileges that far exceed anything he has paid in — exceed his payments by more than ten times (or five times counting employer payments)! I checked this using my work history. I download my wage history from ssa.gov, downloaded the payroll tax history from somewhere, and download one year T-bill rates over my working lifetime so far. It turns out that if the payments from me and my employer had been used to buy one year T-bills, and when those matured they had been rolled over into new one year T-bills, the amount that would be there now would be enough to pay my SS benefit if I started collecting now (2 years before full retirement age) for around 17 years, which happens to be around the life expectancy of a male my age. That's assume the T-bills stop rolling when I start collecting and so there is an uninvested lump sum of cash. Keep rolling over to new T-bills and it can cover several years beyond my life expectancy. That suggests that at least for workers with salary history similar to mine you could actually have a sound system--we are contributing enough that it should be possible to cover our benefits. I'm pretty sure this is just a coincidence. People who made more than me would also likely find results similar to mine, but people making substantially less would probably find their benefit exceeds what their contribution could cover. That's because your monthly SS benefit depends on what your "averaged index monthly earning" (AIME). That's the average you earned a month during your 35 highest earning years with each year indexed to current dollars. The method to go from AIME to monthly benefit amount looks like this (with the specific numbers depending on what you you become eligible to start receiving benefits): 90% of the first $1000 of your AIME + 32% of the AIME over than but less than $6000 + 15% of the AIME at or above $6000 E.g., someone whose AIME is $1k would get $900/month. Some with $10k AIME would get $3100/month. The second person would have contributed 10x as much but only have a benefit 3.4x as much.

s1artibartfast 2y ago
The 1 year return rates oscillate around 0% return when adjusted for inflation, 10 year treasuries average around 1% return when adjusted for inflation. SS as a system is basically break even, returning the same amount of money adjusted for inflation. This is obfuscated by the fact it also redistributes that money and population dynamics. https://www.longtermtrends.net/real-interest-rate/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/real-interest-rate/

readthenotes1 2y ago

"Social Security is not necessarily a Ponzi scheme" except the way the USA managed it.

throw0101a 2y ago

Related: the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) was also a PAYGO system and was reformed in the late 1990s: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Pension_Plan#1998_reforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Pension_Plan#1998_refor... A good book on how it happened is Fixing the Future by Bruce Little: > While the deficit battles have been recounted many times, the story of the reform that rescued the CPP has gone almost entirely untold. In Fixing the Future, Bruce Little explains the CPP overhaul and shows why it stands as one of Canada's most significant public policy success stories, in part because it demanded an almost unparalleled degree of federal-provincial co-operation. Providing an overview of the CPP's entire history from its beginning in 1965, Little pulls together published, and new unpublished, material relating to the CPP reform, and interviews over fifty politicians, government officials, and others who were deeply involved in the reforms for their recollections, insights, and observations. * https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9780802095831 https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9780802095831 It is now a hybrid systems: some component of benefits are PAYGO, but a portion are invested in capital markets (and private equity, by owning things like ports and highways). The investment component is run by an arms-length entity with board members being appointed by the feds and provinces: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPP_Investments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPP_Investments There were further reforms in 2017. Fun fact: it's actually harder to amend the CPP Act than the Canadian Constiution.