(According to this source http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html the projected deficit was going to be $41 billion as of the beginning of August, a couple of months before the end of FY 2010).
According to Wikiepedia FY 2010's DoD budget, all categories except the black budget was $663.8 billion; that's a bit less than the year's Social Security expenditures. As for it's relationship to the whole budget (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_defense_budget#Military_budg...):
"The U.S. Department of Defense budget accounted in fiscal year 2010 for about 19% of the United States federal budgeted expenditures and 28% of estimated tax revenues. Including non-DOD expenditures, defense spending was approximately 25–29% of budgeted expenditures and 38–44% of estimated tax revenues."
The "including non-DOD" apparently includes:
"This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance, cleanup, and production, which is in the Department of Energy budget, Veterans Affairs, the Treasury Department's payments in pensions to military retirees and widows and their families, interest on debt incurred in past wars, or State Department financing of foreign arms sales and militarily-related development assistance. Neither does it include defense spending that is not military in nature, such as the Department of Homeland Security, counter-terrorism spending by the FBI, and intelligence-gathering spending by NASA."
A substantial fraction of which can't be reasonably scored as "military spending".
The real problem people are complaining about is the burden that was shared by many (by having lots of kids) is going to be shared by fewer and fewer people.
WRT "growth in assets": they send out letters to all enrollees stating the amount of money that each has coming to them. and the number is higher than the amount the enrollee has paid in (to reflect the interest that "will accumulate").
WRT "paying out dividends": the system is paying out dividends, obviously. I know some of the people getting checks. Not sure what you meant by this.
I think it's a bit misleading to call Social Security a ponzi scheme -- mostly because it implies a ringleader, which I observe to be a dangerously appealing falsehood to many -- but your observations seem to be false.
either way, people have the right to the results of their own work and this scheme violates that right.
And that's precisely how Social Security operates, and precisely why it will run into problems.
I definitely agree that Social Security is going to go through growing pains as the population demographics change and benefits won't be the exact same as the previous generation, but I feel like people use the term "ponzi scheme" to smear the whole idea of Social Security rather than articulating why we shouldn't have it.
Me neither, and I'm 22 as well. So long as we're not just being manipulated, I think it's probably a good thing. Hopefully it will make us more independent and self-sufficient in the long run.