On Thu, 28 Dec 2017 03:51:11 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Wednesday, December 27, 2017 at 9:35:32 PM UTC-5, Terry Coombs wrote:
On 12/27/2017 8:27 PM, notbob wrote:
On 2017-12-28, Dean Hoffman wrote:

The number of people receiving some sort of SS benefit hit a record
high.
You gotta problem with that!?

I paid into it fer decades. They're jes returning what they stole!

nb

Â* Ed Zachary ! That money was supposed to be in a trust and invested
for our retirement . Instead the ****in' politicians stole it to buy
votes .

That is untrue, no one stole it. By law, the ss surplus was to be in a trust invested in us treasury securities and it always has been.


In other words, just a line item on the $20 trillion debt. It has not
even been a separate trust fund since LBJ put that money "on budget"
to hide some of the cost of his war. (Much like FDR allowed that money
to be taken to hide the cost of his upcoming war)
Neither told us exactly how that debt would be paid.


Had that money I paid in been invested in something that had a
return similar to what I invested on my own I'd be getting about 3 times
what I draw from SS .



That's true, but that is very different from saying it wasn't invested, was stolen, etc. It was invested exactly as the original law required. And remember that while you and most people today realize equities are a better vehicle, people sure were not going to stand for that in the depths of the depression, when ss was created.
And the main point, the promise, the plan was never one based on investment to begin with.


It was originally a pay as you go plan but demographics scuttled that
idea by the 60s when the boomer problem became apparent. Goldwater
tried to warn us in time to actually do something about it and was
roundly criticized about it.
Now it is just a Ponzi and the pyramid has already flattened out. When
the top of a pyramid is only 2.4x the base there is no point to it.