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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

The Freakonomics podcast episode "Ten Myths About the U.S. Tax System (Update)" actually goes into a lot of depth about this issue: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/ten-myths-about-the-u-s-tax... (Includes transcript)

To oversimplify, basically:

With the exception of Social Security, we (the US) has a balanced budget. No politician will get re-elected if they cut social security. (Thus) the politicians are working on the problem very quietly.

The general problem with Social Security is that it pays out way more then it takes in. Part of the issue is that everybody of retirement age collects social security, including multi-millionaires.

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The problem with multi-millionares is not that they collect. It is that they do not pay as much as they could/should.

I’ll read that article later, but that doesn’t sound right — there can’t be so many multi-millionaires that them getting free money is stressing out the system.

Quick random googling, I’m seeing the number 3.2% of retirees have more than $1m

https://www.investopedia.com/how-many-people-really-achieve-...

And I can’t imagine social security would become suddenly profitable by a <3% population delta

Furthermore, multi-millionares have at least 2 million so they are significantly less than 3%.

Social security is self funded and is actually a buyer of US debt. So there is no direct connection between social security shortfalls and US gross federal debt.

To be slightly fair to the parent comment, it seems at least a bit valid to choose whether to consider the social security tax to be revenue to the government and social security payments an expense or to treat them as an entirely separate account. And the social security tax structure at least appears to be quite regressive.

As an analogy: do you think that Costco generates most of its profits from sales of goods or from membership fees? Both answers seem valid.

social security revenues / payments are not included in this metric (US Debt). Social Security is its own huge problem which is different than the US Debt problem.

> > I really need some politics-free scholarship

> The Freakonomics podcast

Yikes.

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