You're paying into SS but that money is not being set aside for you, it's being used for current retirees. The next generation will have to pay into SS for you and betting that SS will not change it's payout conditions till then, in the midst of mounting debt liabilities and potentially shrinking contributions, is quite optimistic.
I'm not sure why you've been downvoted. Your statement has both facts and opinion, and forwards the conversation.
Personally, I agree with your opinion. I think that we're going to get to the point where SS is taking in less than it pays out and, combined with the large amount of individuals who don't like anyone getting government money and so push to get rid of it, the system is going to fall apart.
The worst part is that it's not even the government's money. People pay into the SS and take back out later. It's supposed to work like a savings account, to some extent.
Just to clarify, your payments aren't being specifically earmarked for you (this isn't a government run retirement plan) they are being pooled and that pool is being used to pay for current and future SS beneficiaries, but the pool isn't going to run out anytime soon. It's more likely that it will be diverted for political reasons and defunded - to speak precisely the "entitlements" you paid for will be taken away without recompense.
The SS trust fund is currently about $3 trillion. While the money you pay in isn’t specifically set aside for your own use (the whole point of the program is to pool everyone together), it’s not like a Ponzi scheme where contributions from people paying in are directly used to make payments to beneficiaries.
The SS trust fund is an accounting fiction. The vast majority of it is held as treasury securities and the cash has long since been spent. Thus the federal government has offsetting liabilities for all of those assets. Once SS starts spending more than it takes in, the feds will have to raise capital to cover the shortfall, same as if the trust fund did not exist.
Sorry, this comment missed a big point - the money wasn't spent on Social Security, the money has been borrowed by other agencies and expenditures that owe it back.
That's like saying "Oh man, your job isn't paying you enough money, you should quit." 'But I make 80k, that's plenty!' "Oh, you uh did, until I stole all but five dollars." 'Oh darn, guess I'll quit then.'
I'm well aware that the money was dumped into the general fund and spent on other things. That doesn't change the fact that the money is gone, so saying that the trust fund has $3 trillion doesn't really help with SS's fiscal viability.
If the US government was instead a group of private corporations then the balance for SS would be positive due to the assets they have in the form of debts, just because there isn't cold hard cash there doesn't mean the money doesn't exist - the only way to get to that point is to consider the other parts of the government as bad borrowers and assume the debt will need to be written off.
It's different because the private company didn't issue the securities itself. The equivalent for a private company would be creating $3 trillion in bonds, "selling" the bonds to itself, then claiming to have $3 trillion.
In this analogy, they’d be different departments or subsidiaries with different balance sheets, so there’s no need for the scare quotes: they really are selling the bonds. And they didn’t issue $3 trillion in bonds, they issued $20 trillion and sold most of them to other parties on the same terms.
At the very least it indicates that the company prioritizes the finances of that one department much more than any other.
The other problem I have with this complaint is that it implies that things would be different if it didn’t hold treasuries. If it had $3 trillion in a bank account, would that make it “real”? The US government issues dollars too, and can devalue the currency at will, so it’s not really better.
Ultimately, it’s a commitment mechanism. If SS were paid out of the general fund, it could be cut off to fund other projects at will, as long as Congress were willing to piss off old folks. (Which is already a big obstacle, admittedly.) By funding benefits from a gigantic trust fund holding government debt, cutting off SS to fund something else would require imploding the world economy.
I definitely place myself on the liberal side of politics and will support social security for people before and after myself, but the current generation of older folks definitely appear to be trying to pull that ladder up behind them.
