Angry American: end Social Security

I understand going into this that I'm a healthy 28 year-old who has yet to pay what I hear are exorbitant health care costs. But as a 28 year-old I've also been paying taxes for a decade, watching my pay checks get parsed out to medicare and social security and Federal income taxes.

Before I started paying taxes, back in high school, my parents and my 10th grade teacher taught me the beauty of compound interest. I remember learning (reluctantly) about investments and how money I invested as a twenty-something could make me a millionaire by the time I retire. Well, I've put money away, and certainly have yet to see the beauty of compound interest due to the recession, but I'm confident that my future retirement is more assured by those investments than the tens of thousands of dollars I've lost to social security.

Social Security is insolvent. It is a pyramid scheme by definition: those who paid in first are earning their returns off those who bought into the program later. Unless we as a nation keep out-breeding the generation before us, we're fucked.

There is plenty of blame to go around regarding our deficit. Last week the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan hit a sad budgetary milestone of $1 trillion dollars, or about $3 trillion once you factor in other spending like VA benefits, etc. But I'm not worried about defense spending. Those costly wars will end, social security and medicare will not.

These days the maximum amount a social security earner can get per month is $1,100.00. This is a substantial stipend, but most agree that it is insufficient to live on. Even so, over 20% of this year's federal budget went toward writing Social Security checks.

On a conservative estimate, this year I will pay $5,000 into Social Security. If I invested that money (likely back into US businesses through the stock market), and earned a 5% interest in it until the time I can retire under current Social Security laws (age 66), that $5,000 would have become about $32,000. That's almost three times the amount I can currently expect to make of my social security investment each retirement year (assuming it's still solvent by then.)

While I understand our obligation to those who have grown to depend on Social Security, we as a nation should ensure they are not left out to dry. But for we who are under 40, I would gladly surrender all the money I've put toward Social Security up to this point in my life if I could stop paying into the program tomorrow. It is a waste of my money.

Does this put the burden of retirement back on the individual? Absolutely. But who would you trust with your retirement: yourself, or someone else who is also trying to manage the retirements of 300 million other people?

I'll leave fixing the health care system out of this argument. It is a much more complex problem whose solution (I feel) lies more in regulation than it does in entitlement programs. But Social Security is bankrupting America and making us far more insecure that the name might imply. Get rid of it.