Social Security

When a single taxpayer pays into Social Security for a lifetime and then dies before age 66, the money they paid stays with the government.  It’s like having your house looted before the estate sale.

If the taxpayer was married, then one half of their monthly benefit is paid to their widow or widower. The money we and our employers are required to pay to our social security accounts is not invested to grow. It goes to the federal government and is used to pay current social security benefit recipients.

If social security accounts were owned by the payers, the balance in the account would be owned by the families of those owners. Owners could invest these funds and triple or quadruple the account balance over their lifetime.

If we worked for 45 years and earned an average of $50,000 per year and pay 15% to Social Security, we would have paid $7500 per year over 45 years contributing a total of $337,500.  If that money had been invested in our own account and had tripled, we would have a total of $1,012,500.

There are two failed mechanism in Social Security. One is that funds are not invested to grow. The second is that benefits are based on a defined benefit like a pension plan. It assumes that government will be able to afford to keep this plan. It assumes we will have a socialist system, not a free market economy. Not much can be done to fix this socialist sand hole until the federal government pays off the national debt completely.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader