Two articles about Social Security on msn.com recently caught my eye.
In “6 Reasons You Won’t Get Social Security,” Rob Poindexter explains why you might miss out on receiving Social Security benefits. In “6 Groups Who Cannot Rely on Social Security,” Miranda Marquit explains why several types of people should not count on receiving Social Security benefits.
Poindexter six reasons are: (1) you haven’t earned enough Social Security credits, (2) you are a government employee, (3) you failed to pay self-employment tax, (4) you are divorced, (5) you retire in certain foreign countries, and (6) you are an immigrant.
Marquit’s six groups are: (1) infrequent workers, (2) noncovered workers, (3) certain debtors, (4) certain expatriates, (5) many prisoners, and (6) self-employed people who don’t report.
This reminds me of the six reasons why you shouldn’t receive Social Security and the six reasons why no groups should rely on it.
There are six reasons why you shouldn’t receive Social Security.
1. It is an illegitimate purpose of government to have a retirement program, an investment account, or a safety net.
2. The government is not authorized by the Constitution to have a Social Security program.
3. Social Security is a welfare program just like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Medicaid, and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) are welfare programs.
4. Social Security tax taken from paychecks goes into the U.S. Treasury’s general fund to pay for current government expenditures; it is not put into an account with your name on it that you are entitled to withdraw from when you retire.
5. Social Security is an intergenerational, income-transfer, wealth-redistribution scheme that takes money from those who work and gives it to those who don’t.
6. Social Security is worse than a Ponzi scheme because at least participants in a Ponzi scheme are free to get out once they discover that they have made a poor investment.
And there are six reasons why no groups can rely on Social Security.
1. Up to 85 percent of Social Security benefits are taxable if one’s income is over $34,000 for individuals or $44,000 for couples.
2. The Supreme Court has ruled that there is no contractual right to receive Social Security benefits.
3. Congress can raise the retirement age at any time so that you might die before you are eligible to receive any benefits.
4. There is no connection between the taxes one pays into Social Security and the benefits one might receive from Social Security.
5. Congress can change Social Security benefits at any time by reducing them, means-testing them, or eliminating annual cost-of-living adjustments.
6. The Social Security system is unsustainable because the ratio of those paying into the system to those collecting benefits has declined from more than forty to one down to about three to one.
For further reading on Social Security, see my many articles on the subject here.
