Beating Democrats on Social Security Reform

Money that the taxpayer gets to pay taxes on twice.

Joe Biden voted to TAX SS. Also doesn't help if you give the money to illegals who NEVER paid into it.

If they want to raise the line where you stop paying into it then I think they will need to modify the Act, if that's possible. Otherwise, the people making $400K a year will just soc sec payments of about $10K a month. That won't help the coffers.

Of course the SS fund is broken. The government runs it. They put all of the money into the general coffers. We could have done much better on our own. It is a great Ponzi scheme.

Democrats can not tolerate watching money sitting in an account somewhere. They can not resist the temptation to "invest" it.

If I’m not mistaken, I believe all the money we paid into the SS Trust fund was moved into the General fund and the SS Trust fund was left with an IOU. Had It been left alone, the system might actually have worked.

I used to say the only thing government ran well was the military, but I can't say that anymore. This whole country is just about gone to pot. What a darn shame? The mighty has fallen and fallen bigly.

PTA will not fly. It is way too complicated for the low info voter to comprehend. Manage their own money? heaven forbid. Any suggestion like this is doom to the Republicans. Nice idea, for those that will comprehend it through the blizzard of fake news that will ensue.

I believe it was Chile that switched its form of social security from a government run enterprise and allowed people to invest their money as they saw fit. Money was still taken out of their paychecks, but the money was invested where the investor wanted it to go. As I recall, the typical investor made something like five times more money by this method than they would have made in the old government run plan. Of course, that kind of free market system would never flown with the socialist president the U.S. had at the time.

What about all the Social Security $$ that is given to those that didn't put in a dime?

the only "reform" that should be applied to Social Security is to delete all of the people who are collecting money from Social Security who never paid into the program - Social Security has always been the cash cow for the pols who are protecting the illegals and others who are bleeding money from a program that was designed to help American Citizens(!!!!!), who worked their whole lives and contributed to the program, in their retirement years - the demcommies are the first to speak disparagingly against Social Security but the first to rob from the program when extra cash is needed to fund their, usually, illegal communist social programs - if our government is our greatest enemy then the demcommies are the enemy within the enemy that must be defeated and eliminated

Social Security began with Trust Funds and was overfunded, until the Vietnam War, when the funds were made available to the General Fund to pay for the Vietnam War. Over the years, the funds were also used for welfare payments to many groups that had paid nothing, or very little into the fund. There is no contract with those paying into the fund, per the government's interpretation, and they may change it at any time, and they have. The politicians, in desperation to finance the government deficits, abandoned the gold standard in 1972. Now, the government doesn't really need taxpayers. They can print the money. The government no longer needs to take your 401K or social security directly. They can make it worth nothing by printing the money, which is what they are doing. Republicans and Democrats are all on board with it. They say they need to cut spending, but increase it every year.

As pointed out by others, the money paid in payroll taxes to the SSN trust fund is already invested in Treasurys. This is because they are the lowest risk form of investment and don't require any management expenses or fees like a Treasury mutual fund would incur. The bonds are risk free because they could a be instantly converted to dollars by repurchase from the Federal Reserve if they chose. They don't do this because this would flood the banking system with excess reserves and drive interest rates to zero or negative which is bad for the banking business. The continuing confusion on the viability of the SS program stems from a fundamental misunderstanding about what is really happening. The reason Roosevelt included the FICA tax and trust fund language in the 1935 act was to give people a feeling of entitlement as if they really were investing in their own retirement plan. This also helped get skeptical Republicans to buy into what they feared was another FDR socialist takeover of good ole' Capitalism just to get votes. In reality, it created a true entitlement program that promised to pay any qualified retiree a defined benefit regardless of what their earning history or contribution level was. They never needed the payroll tax money or any fantasy, oracle projected trust fund, it was just an accounting scheme to determine what the benefit level would be for someone at retirement. The entitled benefit is an obligation of the government and must be funded from their own accounts, not some fabricated trust fund. If they need money, they can get all they ever want from their friendly Federal Reserve bank who will gladly wire them the funds as required by law. If it is determined that injecting this much money into the economy in conjunction with other Federal programs is inflationary, then they need to cut out the other discretionary stuff and leave the entitlements alone.