With just a 3% APR on a savings account, if you took the 12.4% that everyone currently pays into social security and deposited in that account for 40 years (25 to 65) of your working life, at the current median annual income, you'd have $715k in cash saved.

If you had invested that into a Roth 401k and invested it in the market at an annualized average return of 7.3% instead, it'd be $2.25M in retirement savings.

Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme because it's taking money as an "investment" from people working today, to pay out returns to previous "investors" who are now retired, while the government has raided it and filled it with IOUs to support spending unrelated to the pension.