with musk and trump gunning for social security, now seems like a good time to remind everyone that social security isn’t like government charity or something. it’s fully paid for. always has been. corporate media loves to parrot the conservative lie that social security is running out of money without ever mentioning why: congress stole the money. they literally robbed from peter to pay paul.
the whole idea of social security was always that you pay into it your whole life, and then when you retire the government gives you that money back. it’s your money. always has been. like sure technically the money being paid by working age people now is going to the people who are retired now. but social security was started in the 30’s, the people who are collecting benefits now paid into it their whole lives. the idea was to be a retirement savings account that the government keeps safe for you because it’s almost impossible for working class people to save for retirement under capitalism.
the problem is that congress looked at all that money just sitting there and decided to use it as a slush fund. and never paid it back. because it’s easier to steal that money than it is to raise taxes for new spending. so yeah, it’s a problem now that there are more old people retiring than there are young people working, but only because congress stole the money it was supposed to be saving for the people now retiring. all those savings could have actually earned money for the people who can’t pay in due to disability etc by being used as a massive investment fund. instead it’s the classic austerity misdirection: sabotage a useful functional government program, then claim that it doesn’t work and is too expensive. and the media never talks about it.
