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Originally Posted by chemgator
All failures or ways to convert a forced savings program into a theft/forced charity program. (I know, socialism is good for you.)
Raising the retirement age provides minimal additional income--the main benefit of this is it reduces expenditures. People putting large amounts of money into SS will retire before the retirement age anyway because they can afford to.
Investing in equities just makes the finances for SS less stable. Investing in T-bills does not give a great return, but it is guaranteed. If you want retirement money in equities, invest outside of SS. If we have an extended recession / depression that includes a stock market crash (or two), then we'll have a serious problem. This recession has been relatively mild from a stock market perspective. I promise you, if the Dow Jones was hovering around 6,000 right now, you would not recommend such a foolish idea.
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Wow. This is what is wrong with this country.
FYI of the Dow was at 6k you'd still be getting many times more money than you would with our current system. People really have no clue how bad of a deal SS is. Put it this way, if you deposited your SS tax in a crappy savings account at death your return on that would be significantly superior to what you get from SS. It's pathetic
And the volatility of the market is mitigated since this is a long term annuity type program. It's essentially perpetual, with huge inflows to boot.
You wouldn't treat it like a 401k where your value fluctuates based on the market. You'd treat it more like a pension plan. Guarantee something as weak as 4%. That is far superior to the 1% we get now. The market will surely do better than 4% long term (we are talking 50 years) and some of the surplus can be used for other programs (as well as tax reduction).
Therefore short term stock market fluctuations won't impact SS. If anything it'll impact the surplus of the program.
In addition the injecting of trillions of dollars into the capital markets would be the largest stimulus this country has ever seen.