Summary
Elon Musk called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” claiming it’s unsustainable due to long-term obligations exceeding tax revenue.
Critics, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, accused him of pushing privatization to benefit the wealthy. Musk also made false claims about Social Security mispayments.
His comments come amid looming Social Security cuts and restructuring. The Social Security Administration warns of potential fund shortages by 2035.
Democrats advocate for raising the tax cap on high earners to strengthen the program.
Elon is a anamorphic Ponzi scheme.
Send that nazi back to South Africa
Put that thing back where it came from or so help meeeee
Unfortunately US Republicans are Nazi’s. Another sad thing is our society is too stupid to see the similarities as well as afraid calling a spade a spade.
US Republicans are Nazi’s.
Better off being sent up to join Willzyx
Okay crypto-fascist whatever you say
It’s not a Ponzi Scheme when there’s nobody standing to profit you dumb fucking idiot fuck. It’s been getting funded for almost 100 years, and has only recently been under fire by assholes like you who accumulate wealth and remove it from being eligible for such a social safety net. Now you’re worried we’re coming for yours and Rogan’s money to fund it, and we will.
Y’all need to stop listening to these morons pal around and podcasts. They mean to harm you and your families, and take away the already middling social programs that benefit you, not them.
It’s not just recently, conservatives have been threatening social security for decades.
Recently as in the last few decades. Reagan pretty much started all this bullshit, and it’s been a tug of war since.
“If I’m not getting rich off it, someone else is.”
That’s how conservatives, from the rich to the poor, see the world.
Only recently?
Biden attacked social security in the 90s.
Says the guy who made most of his fortune on taxpayer money and hype.
I understand what he is saying. It kinda looks like one at first glance, because contributions from current workers go first to pay current retirees.
But what he misses is that we did it that way on purpose. The end goal was to make Americans more secure as a country. Americans could work at their jobs and be confident that they would be taken care of in their old age by the younger generation as a whole, Americans taking care of each other. I understand that the money I pay in now is going to support my parents and their generation, and I really dont mind. We’ll see if these dimwits ruin it by the time I need it.
Everything with these MAGA idiots is zero-sum. If they are paying money to anyone, they need to be the ones getting the benefits from it, otherwise it is a “scam”. The problem with zero-sum is that there always have to be winners and losers. And if the people in power are always the winners, what does that make us?
I understand what he is saying. It kinda looks like one at first glance, because contributions from current workers go first to pay current retirees.
But that’s how private insurance and retirement plans work too. The only difference is that private ones also benefit some rich CEOs at the top who have a vested interest to not distribute the funds.
The existence of disability insurance (SSDI), in and of itself, is enough to refute this “ponzi scheme” bullshit.
There are people who have never paid a cent into Social Security, yet receive benefits.
Imagine that with an actual ponzi scheme… Instead of giving Peter’s money to Paul, you give it to Sally who’s paraplegic, can’t work, and has paid nothing into the fund.
@MicroWave Ponzi schemes by their nature are short-lived; According to Wikipedia, Charles Ponzi’s original scheme ran just over a year before collapsing. All pyramid schemes require a pool of investors that is constantly expanding, which is not the situation with Social Security.
With social security, the pool of investors is the entire country’s population. This large size and government backing stabilises it. But the financials still rely on continuous population growth, forever, to work well.
The key financial metric in social security is the ratio of pay-ins to pay-outs. For example, it could be 5 paying employees for every retiree. The social security scheme has some minimum, critical ratio that is needed to maintain the tax rates and benefit levels. And if that minimum is, say, 5:1 workers to older retirees, that implies a population in a state of exponential demographic growth.
Right now, the US is propping up its lack of organic demographic growth with immigration, and accumulated trust fund savings from an earlier era. Japan had massive problems with its social security when its population stagnated.
Notice, however, that the government of Japan did not just implode like a securities fraud. This is because governments are fundamentally not like private sector criminals running Ponzi schemes.
And if that minimum is, say, 5:1 workers to older retirees, that implies a population in a state of exponential demographic growth.
Well, not necessarily; it relies on the average person working for 5x as long as they spend retired. If we start working at 20, and retire at 65, and the ratio is 5:1, then it allows for an average of 9 years of retirement per person before we die. The problem is that now people are living a lot longer than they were in the 1920s, which is why there’s been discussion if raising the benefits age to 70. This would allow for 10 years of benefits, taking us to an average lifespan of 80 (which happens to be just about what the average lifespan in the US actually is.)
If the population is stagnant, but the age distribution remains steady, this would let the system self-sustain. It becomes problematic when there’s a higher ratio of retirees to people just entering the workforce, though.
The 2025 earnings tax cap for social security is $176k.
If those richest among us, like Elon who makes billions per year, had to pay social security tax on a larger percentage of their earnings, or on all of it like those of us making less than $176k annually, the system would easily be solvent in perpetuity. The only reason it’s potentially at risk is because rich assholes have lobbied successfully in order to not pay into it.
What is their counter argument, would it increase the velocity of money and inflation, raising interest rates for everyone and inhibiting economic growth? Or would it be that we’d need to raise capital gains taxes, which would cause US investment to flee?
The argument is it’s not a tax or insurance but a communal retirement fund meant to supplement private retirement benefits or keep the elderly out of poverty. It’s limited in what it pays out so your investment should be limited at the same place
People who earn $176k get the highest benefit, and they don’t get anymore no matter how much more they earn. They’re not getting more so don’t think they should pay in more.
I don’t know how the benefit is calculated but presumable if higher earners kick in more, the formula would need to change so it’s not all going back to them
Here’s my counter-argument to that:
Considering none of their companies or financial trusts would be worth anything without workers, I think we should cap the benefit at $176k and increase contributions to have no cap as a way to thank the workers. This would give people a good retirement to look forward to after a long career in service to the various institutions.
Further, if some of them still have billions after 4 years of this updated social security investment policy, we should make being so illegal and kill off the billionaires by applying a wealth tax until they’re just regular old millionaires. This would fund the now desperately needed infrastructure projects to keep the country safe and modernized.
It’s a free market so they’d be welcome to solely do business in Russia or the Cayman Islands or something, if they’d prefer.
Should have listened to Al Gore: Lockbox
What a different world we would be in if Florida didn’t fuck up in 2000
Had FL simply not allowed Jeb to chair the committee to elect his brother in FL…
Conservatives think the government should be run like a business. You’re not buying or selling anything, the point is to serve the people you fucks.
How should it be run, like a Keynesian, an MMT, a monetarist, something else?
MMT is how it’s currently run, and that’s fine if we didn’t schizophrenically fuck up that path every four years by trying to pretend taxes pay for spending like a business.
Realistically, though, the government should just distribute the resources necessary for life, utilizing whatever means necessary to obtain and redistribute those resources equally without harming anyone’s basic human rights.
Money, currency, etc is for trading with outside forces. That’s what it was developed for. Trade with people you don’t trust. For the majority of human history local economies ran entirely without currency being involved, with it only being needed for trade. It was fine, it was better locally.
We can even more easily implement a sharing or trust based local economy now that computers are a thing, and we can easily distribute and equalize necessary resources for the same reason.
Except then you couldn’t obtain capital, and couldn’t rent things. And without rent you can’t become obscenely rich. So we can’t have that.
If Musk dislikes “Ponzi schemes,” maybe start by rejecting government subsidies for his ventures.
🐱🐱
Didnt Reagan under a conservative government allow the money to be spent, in order to pay for the debt left over after the great society act?
It therefore would now be a ponzi scheme, where past investors pay new investors, until the outflows outpace inflows and it fails.
No, what happened during the Reagan administration is that the government recognized that decades in the future, the predicted change in the age pyramid would mean more retirees and fewer workers to support them. So rather than slightly increasing SS taxes in the future to cover this, they started increasing SS taxes immediately and investing that overpayment in Treasury bonds (this is the origin of the Social Security “trust fund” which is routinely misrepresented as the entirely of the SS system). This SS trust fund money is primarily what allowed Reagan to run enormous deficits (“fiscal conservative” lol) without causing interest rates to spiral out of control.
There is absolutely nothing about Social Security which is in any way like a Ponzi scheme. It is simply a pension plan applied to the whole country instead of just an individual company.
Ah interesting, thanks for the correction. Though since treasuries are paid by the government is it not then still a ponzi scheme, in the fact the bonds must be redeemed to pay for shortfalls, in which case the government must tax the existing population to pay for the redeemed bond to fund the old?
If we are looking at our existing scenario with the baby boomers I’d assume we must be close to being forced to liquidate, and taxes will rise on the young for the bond repayment?
If they allowed people to opt out would it not be the case that as people opt out you’d need to raise taxes on the young as more people opted out, since none of the money actually still exists, cascading into an insolvent system just like how a standard ponzi scheme unwinds?
Just forget about the “trust fund” because as I mentioned, it’s not central to the way the SS system works. Social Security is simply a system whereby a large base of workers pays taxes to fund the (modest) retirement of a much smaller number of retirees. These are rough numbers, but: the average man starts work at age 21 and retires at age 65 (meaning he pays into the system for 44 years); the average male retiree then dies at age 76 (meaning he collects SS benefits for 11 years). So on average, four workers pay SS taxes to support one retiree. The average SS benefit is $1,583 per month, which means the average worker needs to pay just $396 per month in SS taxes for the system to remain solvent indefinitely. The median annual salary in the US is $59,384 (or $4949 per month) which means the SS tax rate only needs to be 8% (it’s currently 6.2% because the trust fund is being dipped into). Any shortfall could be easily made good by 1) raising the tax rate, and/or 2) raising the cap on taxable income.
This is why the “Ponzi scheme SS” meme is bullshit. A Ponzi scheme provides fake returns to investors by returning part of the money invested by new suckers; as soon as you run out of new suckers, the scheme collapses. Social Security does not in any way rely on perpetually finding new suckers, it only relies on the demographic reality of human beings having a much longer working life than retired life.
Alternative headline: expert on ponzi schemes bemoans what he sees as competition
Joe Rogan is watched mostly by young people, many of which are also too young to realize that cutting social security means they’re going to spend a good chunk of their adult life taking care of their parents until they die. That means paying for their housing or living facility, or having them live with you.
Reaching these young people to get this across to them is the tricky part.
Just let your parents starve to death on the street. Duh.
Lol Bro doesn’t know what a Ponzi Scheme is
He doesn’t know what almost anything really is, despite all the bullshit he spouts. He’s the human embodiment of the Dunning Kruger effect.
The entire stock market is basically a ponzi scheme.
Push pensions, 401k, 529, HSA money into one spot and then rug the whole market every few years.
