Cool down. That’s a great laugh this morning.
To paraphrase Ben Folds
Y’all don’t know what it’s like
Being malemiddleupper class and white
Fyyp
So it doesn’t quite work this simply because people earn more if they age, but if he worked 47 years, that’d be an average of $10,000 per year into Social Security.
Invested over 47 years, that gets us to the $640K if it returns 1.3% a year. So if inflation averages 3%, we only need the Trust Fund to return 4.339%, based on those numbers. (Edit: if it was already adjusted for inflation, even better?)
A problem that nobody ever talks about is that the Trust Fund invests entirely in government bonds, and returns are thus dropping due to Fed policy.
Somehow right now we’re getting < 3% on the Trust Fund, I have no idea how that’s possible in the current rate environment. Not sure if the assholes in Congress changed something, or what, but right now Social Security is lending money to the US Government General Budget at way less than the prevailing rates.
Anyway it actually looks like a lot of this could have been solved if a couple decades ago we just said, “OK, the Social Security Trust Fund should be 70% bonds 15% S&P 500 15% DJIA.”
I don’t concede the premise that social security is an investment fund and needs to break even.
It’s a program that provides cash for old people. It should always provide enough cash for old people, otherwise old people will be quite poor like they were before social security.
Social security taxes should go into the general fund, and payments should come out of the general fund.
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The great thing about being in New Orleans for thanksgiving is that it’s 60F and people here are wearing parkas like they’re on a South Pole expedition
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I’m not saying we should stop collecting taxes for it. I’m fine with increasing them. But over a long horizon, the higher the rate of return, the less we have to tax.
Right now, unless I’m misunderstanding something, the Social Security Trust Fund is loaning money to the general fund of the US government at below market rates. That means our retirement fund is subsidizing our other spending, which is helping reduce deficits, which indirectly helps lead to more tax breaks for the wealthy.
I wouldn’t be on board with this – it would be another way for us to support capitalism with government money.
I can just imagine a day where the top company or companies in the S&P 500 are in trouble, and “we have to bail them out, Social Security depends on them!”
Yeah we’d have to put NO BAILOUTS, ASSHOLES in the law. But we’re subsidizing government spending with low interest loans so it’s kind of indirectly the same thing right? Low corporate taxes are more feasible when the government is borrowing money from SS at 2-3% when the prevailing rate is more than twice that.
No cheating, but guesses on what % of the total sp500 market cap is the social security trust fund
I would love to play, but I looked that up earlier when making my post. Curious to see how other people’s guesses compare to mine before I looked.
Best sport. Worst league.
No it’s a terrible sport too
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I am squarely in the “hockey is awesome live, unwatchable on TV” category.
I’m from the land of hockey and i have zero desire to ever watch it. I’ve only been to 1 Wild game in person and think I’ve watched less than 5 or 10 on tv.
I haven’t watched hockey in forever, are custom goalie helmets not allowed anymore?
I guess not? It used to not be a big deal, but now the league has a policy of bending over backwards to ban all forms of expression on jerseys & equipment to protect 7 bigots from having to explain that they hate gay people when the rest of the league was wearing Pride jerseys.