US GOVERNMENT SAYS SOCIAL SECURITY IS A “BENEFIT”

…FDR Signs the Social Security Act in 1935

 

Someone in the US Government re-named the “Social Security Retirement Checks”, a “Federal Benefit Payment”.

 

An very alert friend recently made me aware that our wonderful government has once again made a move that will miss-apply a name to what we generally refer to as “our money”.

 

If you are as most Americans are, you have probably been paying into your Social Security (SS) contribution account since the first day you worked at a legitimate job.  For years, we all just referred to it as “all those deductions being taken out of everybody’s pay check”.  Even though you could actually have called it: “all that money that goes into my Social Security account”, however, nobody actually talks that way.

 

I found it interesting that today, most younger people when asked, don’t realize that a big chunk of the money that is taken out of their paycheck is actually their own money going into their own retirement account.  They just look at it as, “more taxes to the US government”.

 

Well, now the government has taken another step to make sure these younger people continue to think that all that the money out of their pay checks is a tax, and not their money.  They have done this now by changing the name of the Social Security Retirement Checks to a “Federal Benefit Payment”.

 

The SS retirement check has always been a payment based on all the money that we American workers have contributed into our accounts, many over 40 years of employment.  But the government obviously wants all of those that receive their SS payments to think that this money is a pure benefit coming from the government.  That it’s not actually getting back a portion of our own money.

 

Of course, what is really sick is that today they say the Social Security program is also going broke.  Well, that’s not actually true, but the SS fund would be in excellent shape if the same US government hadn’t used the account’s funding for other things than our retirements.

 

As a case in point from my friend, he noted that if you averaged $30K per year over your working life, that's close to $180,000 invested in Social Security.  If you calculate the future value of your monthly investment in social security and your employer's contributions at a meager 1% interest rate compounded monthly, after 40 years of work you'd have more than $1.3+ million dollars saved!

 

This is all your personal investment into your personal SS account.

 

The reality is that if upon retirement, you took out only 3% per year, you'd receive $39,318 per year, or $3,277 per month. 

 

But today, that would be almost three times more than today's average Social Security benefit payment of $1,230 per month,  And that’s according to the Social Security Administration.

 

But if that were the case, your retirement fund would last more than 33 years or until you were 98, if you had retired at age 65! 

This is how the average American retiree could live in retirement if our government had just invested our money in low-risk interest-earning accounts.  Instead, those folks in Washington pulled off a bigger Ponzi Scheme than Bernie Madoff ever did.

 

They instead took our money and used it elsewhere, not for Social Security.  They conveniently forgot that it was OUR money they were taking.  They didn't have a referendum to ask us if we wanted to lend the money to them.  And they didn't pay any interest on the debt they assumed.  And then they tell us that the remaining money won't support us until sometime in the 2050’s..

 

To add insult to injury, they have now started calling Social Security a “benefit”, as if it were something given to us coming directly from the government.  Not that we or our former employers were the ones that put the money in the accounts in the first place.

 

They need to understand that borrowing our money without our approval, not paying any interests over all these years, these payments are not a “benefit from our government”, and it’s not a charity, it’s  OUR MONEY!!!

 

Instead of calling it a, “Federal Benefit Payment”, it should be called, our *Earned Retirement Income Check,

 

Next time you go into the voting booth, think about this before putting that “x” in the box.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016