Where did your Social Security go?

Taken from a rant off Facebook and modified to use less hyperbole. This is mostly for my poorer relatives who worship the conservative party (which today is a misnomer) and think that party can do no wrong.

You contributed to Social Security and your employer did too. It totaled 15% of your income before taxes. If you averaged only 30K over your 49 year working life, that’s close to $220,500. If you calculate the future value of $4,500 per year (yours & your employer’s contribution) at a simple 5% (less than what the govt. pays on the money that it borrows), after 49 years of working you’d have $892,919.98.

Note these numbers are kinda fuzzy, but it cuts both ways supporting and drawing fire from the conservatives. 15% assumes medicare payments.

When you retire, if you use only 3% per year, you would receive $26,787.60 per year and it would last better than 30 years. And that’s with no interest paid on that final amount on deposit! If you bought an annuity and it paid 4% per year, you’d have a lifetime income of $2,976.40 per month.

Conservatives argue the math presented here, but won’t address the fact that people paid into a program that was supposed to protect them as seniors. The republicans will also not address the “borrowing” of the money.

Washington has pulled off a bigger Ponzi scheme than Bernie Madhoff ever had. Entitlement, my foot, we paid cash for social security insurance. Just because the government borrowed the money, doesn’t make my benefits some kind of charity or handout.

Congressional benefits include free healthcare (the best in the world), outrageous retirement packages (the best in the world), 67 paid holidays, three weeks paid vacation, and unlimited paid sick days–now that’s welfare. Those government officials who have the nerve to call my retirement entitlements have really distanced themselves from the average Joe they are supposed to represent.

They call Social Security and Medicare an entitlement even though most of us have been paying for it all our working lives and now when it’s time for us to collect, the government is running out of money. Before we cut a single dollar from social security or medicare, we should start with the pay and benefits that our elected officials have awarded themselves. We should kill the massively expensive military programs for future jets that never got off the ground. We should look really hard at our role as the world’s policeman.

If you are voting for a candidate for president who thinks that social security or medicare should be cut to balance our budget, I would politely ask you, “Are you crazy?”

Update: I’ve received a comment that rants and raves about copying from the Internet (as I stated in the intro), bad math, and more. To that reader I say, tone it down and I might include your comment. But if you want to go off on me, get your own bully pulpit.  :O)