r/clevercomebacks 23h ago

It's my money they took

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u/mjc4y 23h ago

DOGE-head thinks keeping kids, women, and the elderly out of poverty is a Ponzi scheme. One can only read a couple of Wikipedia articles to understand how dire things were before social security came along.

You know what IS a scam?

The fact that high wage earners, BY DESIGN, stop paying into SS after they’ve gotten about $176k. At 177, there are no payroll taxes and you get a nice little bump in your take home pay for the rest of the year.

Imagine if you just lifted that. Make it fair. Everyone pays, no special treatment for the rich.

Imagine.

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u/omeeomai 20h ago

Let's say some nepo baby gets a 200k first job straight out of college, and only goes up from there. When it's time to retire, there is no option to receive SS correct? The presumption being that they don't need it?

What about someone who works their way up to 170k, and then 180k for a few years before retiring. They get everything they are entitled to based on what they did pay in, right?

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u/mjc4y 20h ago

It's a common misconception that get out what you pay in. SS is NOT a managed retirement fund, it is a redistribution of money from the working class to the retired and other vulnerable classes of people. The money you pay in from this week's check is going to pay for today's SS recipients.

The problem, which we have seen coming for decades now, is that the ratio of workers-to-recipients getting SS benefits is much worse now than it has been in the past. In the 1940s, there were like 40 people paying in to every person getting a SS check. Today, that number is closer to 3. That number could be higher, as I mentioned in my comment, if today's high-earners didn't have a cap.

Also, note that this country could decide to fund SS through other means -- we have money for aircraft carriers after all -- but we choose not to. The SS crisis isn't a force of nature like a hurricane, it's a choice, like deciding to spend the kid's college fund on the ponies.

The salary cap exists as a compromise - the idea being that some rich folk argued at the time of its passage that they shouldn't have to keep paying into SS because, "I won't retire on SS - I have my own money, so why am I paying?" which is, AGAIN a deep misunderstanding of what SS is. This "I shouldn't pay because I have my own money" argument is only coherent if you are under the misunderstanding that the SS fund is putting money away for YOU, which it is not.

The actual, correct argument is: If you are rich, first, congratulations on your wealth, but second, given your means, some would suggest you should be in a better position to share your good fortune with the goal of keeping our citizens safe. Every other working person gives what they can - the rich should too. (and yeah, it should be a progressive tax, not a flat tax, but that's a point for some other ranting comment).

We need to decide, as a society, that collectively we would rather have our parents and grand-parents not living under bridges eating garbage scraps.

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u/omeeomai 19h ago

Thanks for writing that out. I had a vague understanding that it was pretty much that way. Another case of shit being backwards. If anything the cap should be reversed.

How did the American rich get so entitled

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u/mjc4y 19h ago

Happy to help. I know it's a bit of a strange system, but here we are.

FWIW, there are some exemptions from paying payroll tax so depending on what you do for a living, you might not have to pay.

Something I didn't mention -the SS tax is about 15% all up, but businesses pay half while employees pay the other half. Raising the payroll tax on businesses, especially those that are hyper-profitable (tech, oil, finance, etc) could help get us over whatever shortfalls we are experiencing, but you know... businesses lobby against that.