I am always surprised and disappointed when even republican baby boomers insists that they have "paid for their social security benefits" and are entitled to receive what they've been projected to receive.
No, you were paying for someone else's entitlement, not your own, and now that 78 million baby boomers are retiring, the system is now bankrupt and paying out more than it takes in. So the point is, you think you paid for it, but the facts simply point out that you didn't pay ENOUGH. You've been being warned for four decades that this would happen and you didn't do anything. And now, instead of looking at the brutal facts, you're barbarically demanding your right to pillage your children so long as you get what was erroneously promised to you.
Yes, if in 1935 when the ponzi scheme was founded, they would have actually set up accounts into which the Social Security taxes went and then were invested, there would be lots of money there still today. But that was never how the system was supposed to work. Initially is was founded on the idea of paying people to quit their jobs to make room for younger workers (an incredibly stupid idea that even the slightest amount of economic understanding would disregard as ridiculous) so therefore the first retirees paid nothing and got huge amounts of benefits. My point is; IT WAS ALWAYS PAY-AS-YOU-GO in the hopes that the population would increase and that there would be enough productive workers to pay off the benefits for the top of the pyramid. There was never a 'trust fund' into which people's contributions went to be invested, there was never an insurance pool established to spread the risk that someone might need the benefits before retirement; it was always just a collection/pay-off ponzi scheme.
Now, where America so often gets confused is the idea that somehow our government 'raided' the trust fund. As I have mentioned, the money paid in was never 'set aside' for future beneficiaries. It was always used as regular revenue to pay part of the current year's expenditures. But here's the rub, that does not mean that we couldn't track how much was coming in and how much was going out within the Social Security system itself. All of the money that has gone into Social Security was still being 'accounted for' within the balance sheet of Social Security. So even if we want to use the erroneous argument that 'we borrowed against the trust fund to pay for other stuff' we must accept as just as valid the fact that all of the money that was borrowed from it was paid back. Everyone has always gotten their Social Security payments just as the schedule allowed, and it is now broke; it is now paying out more than it took in, just as the largest ever generation of Americans are retiring.
The sad truth here is, these 78 million baby boomers simply have not paid enough in to keep it solvent. They've gotten to the top of the pyramid and have found that the pyramid is upside down and that there are not enough of their children and grandchildren to pay their way. Their parents and grandparents COULD count on the baby boomers to pay their way precisely because they were a baby BOOM. But between lower birthrates and longer lives, the Baby Boomers never faced up to the fact that back in the seventies, guys like Patrick Moynihan were making it clear that this day would come.
Now, instead of facing up to these facts, the demagogues inflame the retiring generation with financial prestidigitation which deludes the baby boomers into believing that somewhere along the line their 'trust fund' was robbed to pay for other parts of the government. It's a fallacious argument, and even if it were true, they were still the generation reaping the benefits and made any discussion of reforming Social Security so politically poisonous that it became the proverbial 'third rail'.
That's the problem with the baby boomers; they've been hoodwinked into thinking that the money they were putting in was being set aside for THEM. It wasn't, it was always being paid out to their predecessors. Now that 78 million baby boomers are retiring and realizing that their beloved program is now paying out more than it takes in, they are finally adopting the rhetoric of 'remove government waste in other areas of government, but DON'T YOU DARE TOUCH MY HANDOUTS!" Notice the lack of concern for the emerging generations.