I just ran my personal numbers over at the Social Security Privatization Calculator.
I retired from the navy after 20 years. Navy officers aren’t millionaires, not even close. You can look those pay numbers up.
During the 37 years that I was employed (including high school, college, navy, and civil service), my employers and I paid into Social Security.
When I retire at age 68, I will get roughly $2,521 per month.
Had I been allowed to invest that money into bonds, in 2014 I would have had $430,000 in savings. And if I had been allowed to invest it in the S&P 500, in 2014 I would have had $1,060,150 in savings. Yea, I would have been a millionaire four years ago.
That money would also have been all mine. As it is now, if I die before I turn 68, the government pockets all that money. If I had that in the market, I could pass that onto my wife, children, grandchildren, and charitable causes. Nope, now the government pockets it. I will have to live until 76 just to break even on what the government took out of my pay. That doesn’t include what they took from me if I had been able to invest it. I’ll have to live to 103 to make that up (with zero income from the market from 2014 onwards).
The greater travesty is what it does to African-American males. Their average life expectancy is 72 years. My black classmates in high school can expect on average to collect 4 years of social security: $121,000. They would have paid in the same amount as I did, so the government pockets all that money from the blacks and transfers it to everyone else. That is evil.
The system is wicked and needs to be reformed into something completely different.
Give it a try. See how wealthy you would be if the government hadn’t confiscated your income over the years. You can either put in all your own numbers, or use the averages. Just be sure to put in $0 for the years you didn’t work.