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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone under 40 right now seriously expect to be able to collect social security at retirement age? It just seems like a cruel joke at this point.

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Learn more about social security. The worst case scenario is that you'd get roughly 74% of your promised benefit. If Congress intervenes, the outlook will improve. All the arguments are about how much of that shortfall to make up, and how to do it. Aside from some GOP outliers, the broad consensus is that it will continue to exist.

That's really the that for people who will be collecting in 8-10 years. For the under 40 crowd, they don't need it for 25 years and who knows how the demographics will play out then.

Imagine paying in from age 15 to age 55 and then being told that in 10 years you’re going to 74% of what you’ve been paying for for 40 years. You’re 4/5ths of the way there before the bait and switch.

I get the bait and switch feeling, I really do. But in reality that "paying in" is just a tax I've paid, and it's not unusual to get less than I was promised for a tax I've paid. Certainly I desire efficiency for my tax payments, but getting bent out of shape when that doesn't happen is just no way to live.

Well Social Security full mane is Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance.

Imagine paying for car insurance and never seeing a dime back.

Some people win, mostly lower income widows that didn't pay in much. And then lived long past retirement. And then you have some single guy that dies in his early 60s.

>But in reality that "paying in" is just a tax I've paid, and it's not unusual to get less than I was promised for a tax I've paid.

Yeah, don't get me wrong. Taxes are taxes, and you just have to pay it. I have no problem with paying a tax to support elderly and disabled folks right now. But the thought of it still being solvent 30 years from now with the direction our country is heading is totally absurd. I fully expect the entire system to be gutted for our generation the moment a full Republican majority takes control.

But that's the thing, there is no such thing as "solvent"; there is no "account" to be solvent or insolvent. It would be like talking about whether the military is "solvent"; it's just not a thing. The only question is whether spending on a line item in the budget - whether that's the military or social security or whatever else - is or isn't appropriated by Congress.

Or if you insist on thinking in these "solvency" terms, then note that social security has never been "solvent". From day one, people who never "payed in" to the "account" received payments "from" it. That was possible for the same reason it is possible today for social security to pay out more than it brings in: it isn't its own account, its just one line item of spending coming out of the US treasury.

And there just is no political mechanism by which social security payments will fail to be appropriated. If some coalition gains enough control to pass and sign the legislation necessary to eliminate social security, they will be blamed for it by the electorate and will lose power for a generation. No political party wants to sign its own death warrant.

This all does assume the continued existence of the federal government as currently constituted, which is not a guarantee. So if what you're really saying is that you think the US system will collapse at some point before you retire, then that is actually more plausible, I think, than social security being eliminated by legislation under the current system.

But personally I also think it's very unlikely that the US system will collapse before I retire. It's just more likely than the wholesale elimination of social security :)

Honestly, the other possibility is that Congress finally gets off their butts and squares it up again. And then the "losers" are the GenX folks that have been delaying retirement to budget for the 74%. I don't really like the thought of having to work five more years than I really have to, just from the uncertainty around whether Congress will fix it or not.

I too was told in my youth that social security would be bankrupt long before I would ever retire, probably by the same people that told you that. Consider making a quantitative rather than an emotional argument, and let's see the assumptions on which that argument relies.

That statement has been a meme for over 40 years, because it is planted as part of a campaign to sow doubt about Social Security and give cover to those who want to destroy it. The Heritage Foundation/Club For Growth playbook on killing Social Security consists of vaguely questioning the far future of the program, inflating the superficial problems by integrating the worst-case shortfalls over many decades, and systematically underestimating economic growth.

User jeffbee sums it up better than I do in a sibling comment, but yeah, I've been hearing that since I was at least as young as you are or younger. My conclusion, just as sibling comment, is that it's FUD. No politician would come right out and say that the next generation to retire won't get Social Security; they might as well go buy the tar and a bag of feathers themselves. But they're happy to have someone question the viability of the system. Don't fall for it, as your question would have been a letter-to-the-editor in a newspaper 50 years ago, and here we are still cutting SS checks.

I understand the doom and gloom mindset, it feels good to air some frustrations.

But you need to eradicate that mindset entirely. You should expect to collect social security. Period. And when this right comes under threat, you should fiercely defend it. Protest, unionize, become politically active. And as a starter, start showing up when there's something to vote on.

This lame attitude of "everything's shit and going to get worse, ah well" is absolutely ideal for those in power to strip you bare. Don't make it so easy for them.

Yes, because once I stop believing then the FUD raised around social security will have worked and I don't want that to happen. It would imply the people who generate such FUD have a stronger ability to hyperstitize[1].

1. There does not appear to be a verb form of hyperstition

I'm almost as close now to the age when I can start drawing social security as I am to the age when I started saying things like your comment :)

I've only become less convinced over time of the likelihood that SS payments will stop at some point. There are various kinds of restructuring I could envision, but I really don't see any mechanism by which SS payments entirely stop without replacement. We would let the real value of the payments inflate away way before we'd legislate them away. There's just no political mechanism by which that legislation could be passed.

Yes, I seriously expect to collect it.

Keep in mind aging millenials will be a pretty enormous voting block and, given birth rates, we won't have the same large younger generation to balance us that we were to the Baby Boomers.

I remember my teachers saying the same back in the 80's (in between threats of nuclear annihilation, global population bomb, acid rain, hole in the ozone and global cooling).

They're all retired and collecting social security now.

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