The Social Security scandal got even worse this year. Social Security — the federal pension system on which nearly all of us, to varying degrees, will rely — hurtled closer to disaster this year after another 12 months of political inaction and disastrous returns on the fund’s investments. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Data from the Social Security Administration’s trustees show that during 2023 the fund missed out on most of the year’s investment gains, costing America’s working stiffs hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of lost returns. Instead the fund actually underperformed the official inflation rate, meaning that during a year when stocks and bonds both ended up booming, and inflation plunged, the Social Security trust fund managed to lose money on the markets in real, purchasing-power terms. I just cannot understand why Social Security is in such financial trouble. Or why it is heading for insolvency within a decade! Maybe all those talking heads in Washington and New York are right. Maybe it’s because we’re all too greedy. Or we’re not having enough babies. Either way, is there, then, no alternative to “cutting” it, because it’s “unsustainable”? Right now, all of us faithfully paying our FICA taxes have a total of $2.8 trillion invested in the Social Security trust fund. If Congress had chosen to invest that money in …
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Data from the Social Security Administration’s trustees show that during 2023 the fund missed out on most of the year’s investment gains, costing America’s working stiffs hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of lost returns. Instead the fund actually underperformed the official inflation rate, meaning that during a year when stocks and bonds both ended up booming, and inflation plunged, the Social Security trust fund managed to lose money on the markets in real, purchasing-power terms. I just cannot understand why Social Security is in such financial trouble. Or why it is heading for insolvency within a decade! Maybe all those talking heads in Washington and New York are right. Maybe it’s because we’re all too greedy. Or we’re not having enough babies. Either way, is there, then, no alternative to “cutting” it, because it’s “unsustainable”? Right now, all of us faithfully paying our FICA taxes have a total of $2.8 trillion invested in the Social Security trust fund. If Congress had chosen to invest that money in …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]