I often hear people say that Social Security should be eliminated, that we'd do better with our own 401K's.
There are a lot of problems with that argument.
First, it turns us into gamblers. The argument is that people could invest their money better. Maybe. But they can also invest their money worse. So it's a very uneven policy. And that is ultimately cruel. That's just gambling, and experience shows that gamblers are often a lot more confident than is warranted.
The sociopaths among us often say, "Too bad. Individuals should take responsibility for their lack of saving. It's not my fault that some people don't plan." Those same people, though, are telling us that we should eliminate the minimum wage, that if the market doesn't want to pay someone enough to even live, why should it have to. So exactly where is the savings supposed to come from? On the one side, people work hard for hardly any money. On the other side, they're told their failure to save is a moral failing. Where is the discussion of moral failing in having more money than God and still being unwilling to help raise people out of poverty? That seems the biggest moral failing.
Moreover, a lot of what makes the difference in who succeeds or fails is one's parents. Dynastic fortunes. Better schools. Better connections. Sometimes even just better health or better clothing. The narrative is spun that the rich worked hard for their money, but in my experience, poor people work much harder for the scraps they are thrown than rich people ever do, and the notion of "meritocracy" is nonsense because the people who get ahead are just those who get to start ahead of the others.
But while on the topic of morality, let's also look at the structure of Social Security itself. People like to compare it to a 401K, but it's not like that. It's not a bank account. It's a very different beast.
As an example, you become suddenly unable to work, it kicks in right away, even if you didn't pay for a long time. That's very different than a bank account. If you live a long time, it continues to pay you.
There may be issues with cost of living adjustments, but the only reason we don't do those more often is that the aforementioned rich sociopaths insist it's better to give tax breaks to the wealthy. They'll tell you that Social Security is intended only to supplement your retirement, not to be the full amount, and yet they'll back penalties for trying to draw money out of Social Security if you're also getting other income. That's not really how supplements work, and it's a disincentive to additional work.
But my point is that the contract is not for a specific quantity of money. It is a social contract, that you pay into it while you're able and you are paid when you're not able. We could do better on the getting paid part, but the point is for it to keep you from falling into poverty, to add dignity.
It's worth noting that Social Security did not arise in a vacuum. While people COULD invest their money, a lot of people didn't, or else were losers in that gambling. Before Social Security, in the 1930s, the elderly poverty rate in the depression was something like 70%. So there is an objective way to understand what this did for the public. Some have called it the most successful anti-poverty program in the history of the US.
And if we were really worried that investing in the market were a better bet, we could arrange for the Social Security trust fund to do that. That's just an implementation detail and has nothing to do with the overall social promise. If DOGE wanted to do something HELPFUL, instead of aggressively dismantling all of the US government's ability to provide value to the public, they could analyze whether there are better ways to manage the funds.
But, ultimately, government is not a business and social security is not a profit & loss center, even if it's popular for some who don't like it to portray it that way. It mostly pays for itself, but from a moral point of view, its real purpose is to say that we as a society need to have a commitment to our sick and elderly, to assure they are taken care of, BEFORE we declare a profit. If we as a nation are able to give tax breaks to rich citizens only by cutting social programs, then the rich are preying on the poor. The health and welfare of all citizens is our first priority as a nation. We should not be preferencing the already-preferenced before we have attended to that.
1/2 (continued next post)
