You can download your FICA deductions, and the Dow Jones and S&P annual yields. I did, ran them through crude calculations, and came up with a 4% payroll deduction instead of the 15.3% would provide individually owned "nest egg" accounts. Annual 5% withdrawals would provide as much as SSA provides now, and because the Down Jones average yield has been 10% and the S&P has been 13%, that still leaves 3% and 6% growth after nominal 2% inflation. Retirees would own their capital and could pass it on or make emergency withdrawals.
The basic scheme is to maintain the 15.3% FICA deduction for existing workers, but add a 4% "nest egg" deduction for new workers. Or take it out of the 15.3% FICA deduction; or some combination. As older pensioners die off (retire at 70 with average life span of 80 means half gone in 10 years), the FICA deduction would decrease, and in less than 10(???) years would drop enough for the total payroll deduction to be even again, and in another 10(???) years fade so small that the total payroll deduction would be around 4-5-6%, giving all workers a 10% raise.
It's crude and simplistic, but I've never seen any other proposed transition schemes.
I ought to feed that page into an AI and see what it thinks. My calculations ignore taxes and inflation because I wanted a simple starting proposition.
It's the same reason they are glad to delegate as much power as possible to the President -- they'd rather bitch and bellyache than actually take responsibility.
The Presidency problem could be improved somewhat by doing away with the Executive Branch entirely. Congress already interviews all nominees, and they haul them in for circus grillings; why not make them hire chiefs for every agency they create and fund? They could still blame them, but they couldn't pretend there's nothing they could do about replacing the chief they blame.
It wouldn't help as much with Social Security, because that requires real legislation with hard choices, not changing chiefs to rein in excess spending or fraud.
What about investing some of the corpus in an index that historically earns much more than Government bonds, such as the S&P 500?
If you're interested ... this is my own pet scheme for transitioning away from the Ponzi scheme we have now.
https://chartertopia.substack.com/p/transition-12
You can download your FICA deductions, and the Dow Jones and S&P annual yields. I did, ran them through crude calculations, and came up with a 4% payroll deduction instead of the 15.3% would provide individually owned "nest egg" accounts. Annual 5% withdrawals would provide as much as SSA provides now, and because the Down Jones average yield has been 10% and the S&P has been 13%, that still leaves 3% and 6% growth after nominal 2% inflation. Retirees would own their capital and could pass it on or make emergency withdrawals.
The basic scheme is to maintain the 15.3% FICA deduction for existing workers, but add a 4% "nest egg" deduction for new workers. Or take it out of the 15.3% FICA deduction; or some combination. As older pensioners die off (retire at 70 with average life span of 80 means half gone in 10 years), the FICA deduction would decrease, and in less than 10(???) years would drop enough for the total payroll deduction to be even again, and in another 10(???) years fade so small that the total payroll deduction would be around 4-5-6%, giving all workers a 10% raise.
It's crude and simplistic, but I've never seen any other proposed transition schemes.
I ought to feed that page into an AI and see what it thinks. My calculations ignore taxes and inflation because I wanted a simple starting proposition.
It's the same reason they are glad to delegate as much power as possible to the President -- they'd rather bitch and bellyache than actually take responsibility.
The Presidency problem could be improved somewhat by doing away with the Executive Branch entirely. Congress already interviews all nominees, and they haul them in for circus grillings; why not make them hire chiefs for every agency they create and fund? They could still blame them, but they couldn't pretend there's nothing they could do about replacing the chief they blame.
It wouldn't help as much with Social Security, because that requires real legislation with hard choices, not changing chiefs to rein in excess spending or fraud.