MrFatbooty

Okay so yeah, we all know Social Security is messed up. Hell, even I am sick of it. The way I see it, I'm paying a bunch of social security taxes which go directly into the government's yearly budget and it's highly unlikely I'll ever get that money back.

What's weird is that for all the talk of this suddenly being the case, it's ALWAYS been the case. Social Security isn't a government retirement fund, it's a government old-age insurance policy that we as taxpayers are forced to buy into. With good financial planning, it's possible to take that money which gets siphoned out of one's wages and turn it into a whole lot more money, and then that money would negate the need for this insurance policy which is Social Security.

So the Republicans are trumpeting around this idea of personal accounts. But the problem those would create is how the hell does the government get the money to fulfill all of its current obligations to hand out Social Security benefits. It's not like the government is a company which can go bankrupt and disavow its pension plan. It has to pay, and it has to get the money from somwhere. I don't see how that problem can be easily solved. The money isn't going to magically materialize and I don't think anyone really wants the government to go even further into debt to finance the payment of its obligations.

So how do we balance the seemingly incongruous goals of both paying for the current obligations of the Social Security program as it exists now, and also making some way for folks my age to get some of their money back at some point in the future? I for one am sick of paying into the system. But at the same time, if we young folk were allowed to stick our money into privatized accounts, how would the system pay its bills?

So here's some idea which randomly occurred to me: let's have the government issue Social Security bonds. Rather than the typical Series EE savings bond which is purchased for half its face value and accrues interest for a certain number of years and then stops, it could be a savings bond with the same sort of properties as Social Security benefits have now. Like, you buy a bond and it's only good once you hit age 67, but it's prjected to follow inflation or better. So whatever we project inflation to be over the period of time from your age at time of purchase of the bond to the eligibility age, is the fraction of the bond you actually have to pay for. The incentive to invest is to hope that the projected interest ends up being more than the actual inflation of the dollar; and also it's a good way to force oneself to keep assets in a non-liquid form to put away for retirement. That way us young folks can, if we want, still put money away for retirement in a fashion similar to what the private account folks are saying should be like, but putting the money away doesn't cut off the revenue stream to the government and allows it to pay its current obligations under Social Security while phasing it out by the time the Social Security bonds come up for eligibility.

So yeah, this is me purely trying to wrap my head around the issue. I don't think private accounts alone will fix it because they'll abruptly cut off the revenue from the social security tax. Please feel free to post your thoughs on solutions or whatever, regardless of political views or party affiliation. I think this is more a generational issue than one of party, and I think it's weird that the man who hardly is favored in my generation is the unlikely champion for our cause. But whatever, let's try and keep the politics out of it and just crunch on the problem.