Trump official calls Social Security 'wrong' with groundwork for cuts

OK. Go for it.<p>I&#x27;m Gen X. I&#x27;m due for Social Security in a decade or so, but we never expected to see any of it.<p>So go ahead. See how much waste you can actually find in Social Security. If it&#x27;s there, I&#x27;ll applaud that you&#x27;ve saved Social Security for me. If not... well, I&#x27;d kinda appreciate if people would back off on the whole &quot;there&#x27;s so much fraud!&quot; thing.

As usual, all these claims by conservatives of &quot;waste, fraud, and abuse&quot; come with no citations needed. They are just taken on faith that it is so. They claim ppl over 200 are getting SS--&quot;because Cobol.&quot; This is some galactic level genius thinking. And yet why do I, who am alive and kicking, fell like I&#x27;ll be among those taking it in the shorts? Meanwhile, tax cuts to those who already have more money than anyone could reasonably grok; money enough to single-handedly influence the politics of a superpower even.<p>Make it make sense.<p>Despite other comments to the contrary, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Social Security. What <i>is</i> fundamentally wrong is the way people promote their ideas about &quot;waste, fraud, and abuse&quot; without feeling the need to provide any evidence whatever to back these claims. This is faith-based, self serving policy making in action.

I think this is going to be the first large-scale &quot;test&quot; for lack of a better word of Trump&#x27;s base. Because if voters didn&#x27;t want this it&#x27;s gonna hurt.<p>&quot;Paying for his tax plan&quot; is an interesting justification because it seems basically the same for me. Who&#x27;s getting such dramatic cuts to their taxes to need such a thing?

I&#x27;ve paid into Social Security to the tune of $400,000 over the course of 40 years of paid employment. Am I going to get that back? Because, like all rational planners before Trump, I factored Social Security into my retirement plans. If Trump&#x2F;DOGE does away with Social Security, I&#x27;m going to have to work extra years to make up for that. I will be unhappy with Trump, DOGE, Republicans and conservatives who supported him the entire time. I expect I wouldn&#x27;t be alone in that situation.

I think there are two fundamental problems with social security<p>1. People think its a lockbox where there&#x27;s some account with your name on it that your money goes into that&#x27;s managed and when you retire you get some annuity based off that. When in actuality today&#x27;s contributors are paying off past contributors that are now drawing. There&#x27;s a name for this that I can&#x27;t remember<p>2. The rate of return is significantly lower than could be achieved in the market. The expected return throughout your life is 5%. However, for such a long time horizon, an investment into the stock market would make sense, and the long term yield there is around 10%. It&#x27;s a huge difference.<p>If you work from 22 to 65 and contribute 5k per year, by the end you put in 220k. 5% return would be $755k while 10% return would be $3.2m<p>I can&#x27;t understand why anyone would be opposed to re-thinking the system and moving it to private accounts that actually belong to you. Pay off the people grandfathered, but for people still contributing, let them choose. The only reason I see this not happening is that it would be a big up-front cost as we&#x27;re now coming to reality that the old system was poorly structured and politicians would have egg on their face.