Retirement Savings

Social Security is terrible.  This is a tax that you pay your ENTIRE LIFE.  The return on investment is awful.  It is just another example of of the nanny state cradle-to-grave interference in your life.  It assumes that people are too stupid to plan for their own retirement.  Some are, yes, but that is the way government operates: because a small fraction of the people won’t plan properly, the vast majority must suffer.

There is no money in the Social Security trust fund, just IOUs (pieces of paper that say it will be covered).  The politicians stole that money long ago and spent it on irresponsible and self-destructive government programs.  Social Security is a ponzie scheme where new payers are funding the payments going out right now.  If any business operated this way, people would go to jail.

The 6.2% tax is actually 12.4% because your employer must match.  That additional 6.2% would also be yours because your employer considers that money paid for salary and benefits and if we rid ourselves of this terrible program, that money would quickly be paid to employees through competition for labor.

Now imagine what you could do with 12.4% of your income OVER THE COURSE OF YOUR WORKING LIFE.  It’s a BIG number!  When you consider the power of compounding interest, it becomes clear why this system is such a rip-off.

We should pick an age, say 50 and under, and let people opt out of Social Security.  Then every dollar you earn will be yours to save, invest, or use as you see fit.

Retirement savings is not mentioned in the Constitution and therefore Social Security is unconstitutional under the 10th Amendment.  Unfortunately, in the case Helvering v. Davis (1937), the Supreme Court said it was constitutional as an excise or income tax under the “general welfare clause”, Article I, Section 8, Clause 1.   That clause grants Congress the power “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States…”  The founders obviously did not intend for the words “general welfare” to mean “anything and everything not enumerated in the Constitution”!  The “general welfare clause” has become a favorite catch-all to justify anything the authoritarians want to do.  The majority opinion in the Helvering case said that because Social Security was in response to a “nation-wide calamity”, that made it O.K. to suddenly say the Constitution means something other than it did for the previous 149 years.  It’s just wrong.