1142
It's rigged (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/workreform@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Social Security is supposed to be like a forced retirement account - what you pay in is what you get out of it later. It was essentially an emergency measure put into place when a lot of Americans were struggling. Since it doesn't make sense to have a payout above a certain amount, as it would be above the average cost of living, there's a cap of how much is collected per person per year.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    But that's never been the way it works. Your payment finances the government budget, one of whose functions is to pay out social security money to current retirees. If you set up the income tax in such a regressive way, there will not be enough money to pay social security, which is of course what Republicans want so that they can have another excuse to cut the program entirely.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    Ostensibly you would only draw from SS what you've paid into it; of course, that's only how it's supposed to work, and not how it actually works. In reality, current SS payments go to pay benefits for current retirees, making it more of a Ponzi scheme that will leave today's workers hung out to dry with nothing to show for all the money they've poured into it when it gets inevitably murdered.

    But you still can only draw payments if you've been paying into it for at least ten years, which essentially makes it like giving the government a decade-long zero-interest loan.

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