No, what I am writing now is not satire, but a report I saw two days ago – which is still relevant as long you don’t have your own retirement account – was indeed funny.
The AP report of Monday September 27, reads as follows: “Big job losses and a spike in early retirement claims from laid-off seniors will force Social Security to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes the next two years… The deficits — $10 billion in 2010 and $9 billion in 2011 — won’t affect payments to retirees because Social Security has accumulated surpluses from previous years totaling $2.5 trillion. But they will add to the overall federal deficit.”
What? If SS has a surplus of 2.5 trillion bucks, why will “borrowing” $19 billion add to the overall federal deficit? Ah ha. You got it: the $2.5 trillion “surplus” exists only on paper, because the federal government has through the years spent all this money, therefore now when SS is running short, the government needs to borrow this money.
To understand it better, imagine this: you place into your emergency/retirement fund $5,000 every year starting at age 25 all through age forty when you were out of work for a half year due to a health issue, and therefore used some money from your emergency fund to get by the month. When returning to work, you continue placing your annual $5,000, but in the same time you “borrow” out every year a few thousand dollars to cover overall expenses, but being faithful to your retirement plan, you leave a note in the fund that “I own my fund $3,000, $6,000” and so on.
At age 65 when retiring, you will find yourself with just a few thousand dollars in your fund, and a bundle of papers written by you that you own this fund $70,000. Of course your “surplus” of all these years that you didn’t use (just “borrowed”), doesn’t serve you a day because it is gone. Instead you have to borrow money to cover your retirement.
This is basically the case with social security. So… it IS funny that instead of rioting in the streets and throwing out our political leaders due to this scam, all of us still pay into this already-bankrupted system, and many of us don’t even have serious retirement plans because we think we have “some” sort of net when turning 65 called social security.
What a damn joke.
