Famously, America has shown to be exceptionally skilled at getting the rich to help pay for society they sit on top of.

If nothing is done it’s a mathematical fact. The problem is that there are no plans to do anything yet, each administration and congress seeing it as too politically volatile to deal with, which means we will have a last minute suboptimal solution.

Obviously there are solutions. Maybe if America survives that long we might see one implemented.

A quick check (ie, letting ChatGPT do the math) shows that if all caps on taxation was eliminated, it would help, but not solve the problem completely.

I never imagined that, in my lifetime, Roe would be overturned or that entirely untrained federal thugs would be allowed to murder people on video with no repercussions at all… we live (as others often have) in strange times.

This is fantasy. There's nowhere for the money to come from. They're going to raise the age, reduce benefits.

Being convinced of disreality is a pervasive weapon that keeps being leveraged by the valent evil bad forces to make things worse and worse. Gladly tying the blindfold around your eyes should not be allowed to look as cool as this kind of post tries to exude.

Theres something so PKD about these fake realities, that have breached any and all containment, that people so readily deny any sense & sensibility. Just because. It's caused such huge disasters already. But it feels like still so many slumber on, that camp Wide Awake suffers so.

Brandolini's Law, the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle lurks below every reality based discussion, waiting for any chance to plunge thr pariticpants through to the unfathomable depths of unreality. It's a bitch of a structural advantage to be able to leave engagement and caring and discussion behind at any point, and plunge into that freezing alien other, to leave reality behind.

Social security was created so that money collected day one could be distributed day one. Allowing people to opt out and invest the money is incompatible with the model as a whole.

It's like asking if you can save today's extra heartbeats for when you're older.

> I wish i could just opt out of social security and invest the money myself.

I'd like to emphasize that SS/OASDI is not an investment program in the first place, it is an insurance program. The two kinds cannot be directly compared, and have very different mechanics and features. You might already have known that, but the misconception is distressingly common in America--which I blame on misinformation from big-bank lobbyists.

> You inherit all risk. But you opt out of the taxes. You must prove retirements assets are being contributed to.

Is inheriting all the risk even possible? Suppose someone signs some dark legal contract in blood, like: "I refuse all public assistance, let me die in a ditch because I shall make my own fate."

What happens if they commit crime (perhaps out of desperation) and are sentenced to time in jail? Now there are three outcomes which all suck differently:

1. The government caves and supports them anyway with taxpayers funding their jail-food and jail-shelter. This distorts the original incentives, and recidivism is going to be a bitch.

2. They are let go, to commit more crimes? Locals won't stand for that.

3. They are indirectly executed by being forcibly exiled to a walled-off isolated place with no food and no shelter, as their families (quite reasonably) cry about the brutality on TV.

Then there's the issue of dependents, and mechanisms for fraud, and both of those are much bigger cans of worms than I want to open in this edit...

Social Security will not run out. It simply won't be taxing current workers enough to pay current retirees. This demographic problem was easily foreseen which is why there is a trust fund to "run out" to begin with. For quite some time social security operated in a surplus since there were many workers per retiree collecting benefits. Now we are around 3:1 workers:retirees and expected to drop to something like 2.2:1.

Where this gets confusing is that most folks seem to have the mental model that Social Security is a pension or some weird retirement account. It is not.

Social Security is simply a pay as you go means tested welfare program. It just means tests in a strange way. If you ended social security taxes today, the trust would run out in a few months and there would be $0 to pay retirees. It's current workers paying for current retirees. Social Security is simply an income tax like any other, but it's separated and marketed the way it is to purposefully make people think it's "their money" and make repealing it politically impossible.

It's just a means tested entitlement program funded by current tax receipts dressed up in fancy marketing. It functions much more similarly to SNAP (food aid) than it does a pension.

Social security can 'run out', because it's setup with separate accounting. It's sort of designed that current year social security taxes pay for current year benefits ... in the 70s and 80s increases in taxes and decreases in benefits lead to a surplus of taxes collected which was held under the social security account. Since about 2009, income and costs have been pretty close and since about 2017, costs have consistently been more than income. 'social security runs out' when the accumulated funds have all been paid out.

If there's no other action, current law says benefits will be cut so that benefit payments don't exceed the tax income.

Closing social security off to new workers doesn't help, because current workers pay the bulk of current benefits.

There needs to either be additional funding (from general taxes or a rise in social security taxes) or a reduction in benefits. But nobody wants to do either of those, so chances are we'll get the default option.

On the plus side, I was a teen in the 1990s and my high school economics class suggested social security might not be wholy reliable, so we should separately save for retirement on our own. I estimate we'll have had at least 30 years of warning when benefits are cut, but likely many will still be taken by surprise, or will not have been able to prepare despite foreknowledge.

> I think based on years of service in government roles or something like that

More or less, with qualifications and levels of degree.

Eg: Was the Second Malayan Emergency active or "peacetime": https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-12/rifle-company-butterw...

Active service in a recognised danger zone ups the pension rate and expands the health benefits (as does exposure to fallout - they like to medically track anyone touched by atomic testing).

Social security is funded through payroll taxes on employees and emloyers. The "run out" is in the sense of the amount of money going out exceeds that coming in and the saved funds have been depleted. In this sense, it can "run out" that the savings are depleted and the plan is cash flow negative.

> It sounds like a defined-benefits fund

The first key is that it isn't defined-benefits, in the sense that there is no account labeled "Bob Smith's Accumulated Retirement." Don't be disheartened though, because many Americans have the wrong idea too. [0 - See rant in footnote.]

In addition, the US has no constitutional barrier to protect it, the federal legislature can pass a regular law which completely rewrites the benefits however they like. It could be very unpopular, though.

> Can someone explain the legal structures [...]

It has grown a lot of bells and whistles over time, but at the core its formal original name of "Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance" is very informative.

* The premiums for coverage are collected as a tax on the working.

* Payout conditions broadly involve being alive and not able to earn enough to stay that way.

* If you pay in and then die young and healthy, you don't get anything. This is normal and intended, the same way that home fire insurance doesn't pay if your house is swept away by a tsunami.

* The program's surplus funds (from planned-for demographic shifts) is invested in bonds with the US government, meaning that there's an intra-governmental credit/debt going on, where OASDI/SS is the creditor and government-in-general is the debtor.

> [...] that make Social Security "run out"?

Most of the "run out" talk refers to a period of time where the invested surplus dwindles due to yet-more demographic shift, and cannot cover the difference between inflow and outflow. At that point one or both of these will have to happen:

(A) Congress passes a law increasing premiums/taxes on current workers

(B) Congress passes a law saying it's OK to pay less than the program did before.

Congress has been procrastinating on this for many decades.

__________

[0] I blame this on deliberate tactics by big-banks, and political groups ideologically opposed to the program. Private banks are unable to make big bucks offering a competing insurance plan, so instead they promote a false comparison. It goes like this:

1. They falsely assert that X% of the current surplus is somehow already exclusively "yours."

2. They claim that "your" money exists in a boring lame government retirement account which only invests in bonds. (Only half-true, in that the surplus is in bonds.)

3. They ask if you'd rather have the option of moving the money to a new account run by Big Bank, who is so much cooler will help you (for a modest fee) invest in stocks which go up much faster so "your" money will be zillions by the time you retire.

This isn’t what my financial advisor told me and I doubt many others would, either.

Social Security is almost certainly going to exist in some form. The question is how much retirees will get from it and how that compares to the cost of living.

Excessive cynicism is often dangerous because it converts the mundanely pleasant reality into an enthralling doom and gloom scenario.

Of course, I’m not really saying that everyone in America is going to have a wonderful retirement. But if you’re like the other software engineers on this forum and you’re maxing out your 401k and have a mortgage, you’re almost certainly going to have a pretty enviable retirement.

It's much worse than that.

Governments, when faced with shortfalls in the government pension, will absolutely nationalize your 401k or IRA.

YOU, while attempting to responsibly take care of yourself, will absolutely be a piggybank to be raided. This has happened in numerous countries.

You wouldn't want to be selfish, would you? Sure, you forgo the midlife crisis sports car in favor of the Toyota Corolla you've been driving for years, but that's just tough. Shoulda lived for the now.

Honestly, the reporting has looked the same around this since the 1980s. I've read books from them referencing how Social Security was going to be bankrupt by the 90s, or the 2000s. The fact is that older people vote way more than younger people, so it stays funded; we will at worst pay for some of it out of income taxes.