re: The Coming Social Security Crisis

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Recently Ben Shapiro and Larry Fink have both come out and said retirement at 65 is crazy.

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Retirement age is 67, not 65.

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What they fail to mention is the tremendous strain people who have never contributed a dime to, but collect from social security.

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You have to pay in for 7 years to get benefits. Benefits like SSI do not come from the SS trust fund.

SS is collecting 12.4% of everyone's pay up to the earnings ceiling, that is 6.2% paid by the employee and 6.2% paid by the employer. Together, that is more than most people every put into a 401K. For most people, the most they ever pay into 401K is about 6% from employee and 3% from company match, so the Gov is working with roughly 35% more money than 401K.

Theoretically, there are some non-working spouses that never pay in but get benefits. First, many of them work for at least a few years and pay in, then never collect on their own earnings history, second, 12.4% is enough to cover them anyway.

If the Government can't get it done with 12.4% over 35 years or so, the Government just can't get it done, and wouldn't be able to if the retirement age was raised to 80.

I say don't let them change benefit levels unless it is to increase them ( and it should be increased). The reason is that our government now wastes billions of dollars a year on stupid sh!t, the SS shortfall exists because of stupid government management of SS, and allowing them to reduce benefits will keep them from ever solving the problem and it will just come back worse.

Failing that, issue the present worth of my future SS benefits in the form of T-bills and allow me to put them directly into my IRA without taxes and trade them in my IRA account, maybe over 5-10 years so they all don't get traded away at once, and I will walk away happy with no SS. In other words, you can still kick the can down the road but I will at least have some opportunity to exit before the train wrecks. Yes, Treasury Bonds remain a part of my retirement plans, this way I get to manage them. No one is better at looking out for my best interests than me.