What do you think?

10% annual return is extremely aggressive. Also… 490k in benefits is what you get today… not in dollars for 2064.

Privatizing public services has never worked *better*.

Despite decades of competing and massive capital, FedEx and UPS are still not beating USPS, and still serve less customers in any zipcode.

This same ‘phenomenon’ plays out with rent controlled housing, health insurance, banking—***no*** service has ever become better because it was privatized.

Putting your retirement safety net in the market that could crash and burn at any time is the single worst idea I’ve seen in a long time. Social security is the way it is BECAUSE of the instability of the market.

this idea that the market saves everything is so obtuse.

I guess we can just ignore how social security came about in the first place. When a depression hits that IRA won’t mean shit.

The rich control and manipulate the market routinely. Do you want your livelihood further surrendered to these f#ckers? Anyone had their pensions stolen lately?

This kind of reasoning is also often under the misconception you pay into the security network to yourself, to reap later. But no. You pay today, for people using it today.

If we’d transfer to an investment scheme as suggested in the pic – who’d pay for the social benefits *today* while my investment matures the coming 30-50 years?

You can’t cheat your way into infinite money. Not even with the stock market. Any one person can get that return and turn it into resources, but if everyone tries you’ll find that all you get is inflation.

Just because you give everyone an account doesn’t mean there will be more goods and services available for the population.

Could do both. Considering how explosively powerful the US stock market is over time I don’t see much of a downside to doing SS and allotting birth benefits in the market.

Sure, and if the market takes a dive the entire country is instantly starving to death. Great plan. The ENTIRE purpose of Social Security is that its a DEFINED BENEFIT.

I’m a libertarian economist.

The goal of social security is in it’s name- *security*. It isn’t about a statistical high yield. It’s about establishing a floor no one can fall under once they’re too old to work.

I think it’s ridiculous. Stop privatizing everything.

The Math checks out, and while it’s a little optimistic you can fix that by doubling the initial investment and tax rate, but there is zero political will in America to fix social security, no matter how obvious the solution or how broken the program. It’s like Voldemort, any politician who speaks the name in public automatically loses their next election. So we’re just going to ignore it until it collapses completely in less than 2 decades and then gut it.

Imagine the entire country being on this new plan and the market crashes. That is why they don’t do this.

The important part is preventing the poorest of us from dying in poverty. Yes, the best of us could make more, but it’s not like there is an insane overhead. It’s just a way to keep anyone over 70 from being homeless if they haven’t saved over a million.

That’s not how Social Security works. My Social Security deductions were not squirreled away for my retirement; they were used to pay for the retirement of my parents (and their generation). My Social Security benefits will be paid for by my kids’ Social Security deductions.

Social security should be a fund you can look at over your life time and it should yield a 5% interest rate. If you work full time from the time you’re 20-65 you’ll invest over $600k into SS. That’s $1.9 million. SS gives you like $4k/mo. It’s criminal

Wouldn’t the major increase in money into the sp500 by the government cause this to become an unstable bubble? Making the sp 500 so expensive that returns would eventually be so small returns on it won’t give you 10% year over year?

Isn’t this what’s happening with college education ? Because of these guaranteed government backed loans, the price of education has become so expensive that it’s made it lessen in value over time compared to the price?

I feel like the original poster literally thinks that the stock market is a binary thing or is an infinite money glitch, when in reality the value is based on actual buyers and sellers.