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Ignoramus16841

On 2010-08-05, wrote:
My attitude is that the government forced me to pay into Social
Security and Medicare saying that it would provide me will all these
benefits when I retired. If I could have opted out of Social
Security, I would have and saved all the money that the government
took from me. So now I figure that I am entitled to collect as much
from the government as anyone else.

I was not able to save as much as the government took, but now I get
more from my savings than I get from Social Security. The reason is
of course that I invested the money that I saved. And the government
spent all the money it collected.

Dan, just keep in mind that what works for one person or a small group
of people (most people do not have substantial savings), would not
necessarily work if everyone was saving. If I recall correctly, it is
called the "aggregation fallacy" or some such. If suddenly, by edict,
the society needed to save more, there would not be enough investment
opportunities, so returns would go way down.

The proponents of eliminating Social Security say something like
"private investment returns were 10% per annum, so if everyone was
saving in private accounts, with same returns, everyone would have a
house on the beach". But there are not enough houses on the beach.

Example of this is Japan, where there was much private savings, and
not enough places to put saved money to work.

Like you, I also try to save for retirement, and frankly I would love
to retire earlier. And I also recognize that it would work better if
not everyone was trying to do the same thing.

i