"Mandatory" in the sense that there are laws on the books that say it must be spent.
Sure, Medicare or Social Security can be cut, but see how that flies in the polls.
Sure, Medicare or Social Security can be cut, but see how that flies in the polls.
You have separate Medicare and social security taxes that fund those programs.
If you cut social security and Medicare, at the very least you will need to change the laws so that taxes intended specifically for social security and Medicare can be used for general expenses.
It’s simply a general tax dressed up in marketing fluff. It’s a pay as you go defined benefits program. Current workers are paying for current retirees.
There is very little difference between it and any other means tested welfare program - it’s just the means testing works in a different manner but can be changed at any time.
It’s no more “your money” than any federal income tax you’ve paid in over the years.
Even if they wanted to do something extremely simple like hold TIPS (inflation linked bonds) and hedge some of the inflation risk internally, buying TIPS from the US government would simply be a circular transaction that would be canceled out by the bond component of the TIPS. Pointless. If SS went out into the global financial market, they would quite literally absorb a big chunk of the global capacity for that risk, and more importantly, on a global level it all feeds back to the US/dollar, especially in times of stress (which having a Gorilla sucking up endless amounts of inflation risk would actually amplify). Again - it would cancel out on net. A program that big is almost too large for traditional financialization. It would need to be buying networks of ports and such like China does with their surpluses, but even here, the US already carries a large amount of geopolitical risk in their financial system (look at the Tariff scare where the bond market almost blew up because the large amount of financial assets held by foreigners were pulled from the country). It's actually fairly interesting to follow these lines and feedback loops and see how everything is connected.
Certainly, it might fly with the uneducated and unsophisticated, but not someone who knows better.
Unfortunately, it's unlikely that the government will collect tax revenues necessary to even keep up with some of these mandatory programs, such as social security. The reality is there is a very serious chance many people do not receive the fully stated benefit value.