Exactly, Frank. While people may have paid into it for many years, what they actually collect out of it for a person of average lifespan is generally vastly disproportionate to the person's true contributions plus any possible earnings on them, had it been used to purchase Treasury securities (for instance).
It would require SSA to have the beef-future trading acumen of a Hillary Clinton, and the freedom of action to use it in investing their FICA tax collections, to actually make the system work in the way those who are "only collecting their own contributions" think it does. Those who make such claims have never run the numbers nor read up on it. Over most of the life of Social Security, the FICA collections were much smaller than they are currently (though even a lifetime of contributions at the current level would be quickly exhausted, just not nearly as quickly).
Thank you, Tanker.
My only experience with social security was a very long time ago, when my younger brother and I collected social security survivor's benefits, both parents never living long enough to get social security retirement benefits.
Both parents paid into the "system" from the time each of them started working. As time went on, both parents had been assessed the maximum amount by circa August or September, and so didn't even have to pay more the last few months of each year.
So my younger brother and I got, I suppose, the then-maximum survivor's benefits, given the size of our late parents' "contributions." My younger brother got them for about a year and a half, before he died in an automobile accident at the age of 17; I got them starting the same time he did, but received them until reaching the age of 22 years.
In college, I made a big deal about the "system;" about how it was a rip-off, and that I myself would never recover what I was paying into it (having worked and paid into the system since I was 14 years old).
Someone pointed out to me no, that was all wrong.
We looked at the numbers, what the parents had paid in, and what my younger brother had taken out, and what I was taking out. I was surprised;
remember, the parents had made the maximum "contributions" for quite a few years.
It seems that by the 4th month my younger brother and I received our checks, we had "exhausted" whatever the parents had put in, and all after that was gravy, money from other people's pockets.
I don't think most people, especially the primitives, understand that "contributions" to the system are actually minuscule when compared with what they get back.
And this is something that really is going to cripple Generation Y (those born after 1980), unless they decide to euthanize us or something.
