The nonpartisan budget watchdog, revisiting one of its favorite subjects, found that Americans retiring this decade are on track to collect, in the form of entitlements, about 133% of everything they and their employers paid in taxes, measured in present-value dollars. Strip out the employer match, and the return nearly doubles: Roughly 265% of what workers put in themselves. A median-wage retiree in 2027 will collect about $730,000 in lifetime benefits on combined contributions of less than $200,000. The math holds together because today’s payroll taxes are covering the gap. Who pays those taxes, and who is retiring and collecting? Largely millennials and baby boomers, respectively.
In nominal dollars, the gap is even more dramatic. A median-wage worker retiring in 2027 can expect about $730,000 in lifetime Social Security benefits, compared with less than $200,000 paid in taxes by that worker and their employer combined, according to CRFB. Benefits outpace total taxes paid after just six years of collecting. They outpace the worker’s own direct contributions after only three.
The consequence is a financing cliff that’s now closely dated. Social Security’s retirement trust fund is projected to be depleted in 2032, with the combined retirement and disability trust funds exhausted by around 2033 or 2034. After that point, according to the SSA Trustees Report, incoming payroll taxes alone would cover only about 78% of scheduled benefits—triggering an automatic, across-the-board cut of roughly 22% unless Congress intervenes before then.
The promise of retirement for Millennials is just a mirage. Conservatives keep sabotaging social security even though it has worked for 3 generations.
Goddamn, I’m so sick of this bad faith argument. Fucking Fortune bullshit.
Remove the Social Security Cap on incomes over $184k and this problem goes away. It’s really that fucking simple.
TAX THE FUCKING RICH ALREADY.
I’m proud of Lemmy’s response to this.
I expected “boomers bad”, but found most comments calling out the bullshit.
This is horseshit that should be deleted. Some VC billionaire is funding a campaign to make everyone hate social security so they can privatize it.
Oh, cool, a multi-prong attack on Social Security, just like I commented on that other article here on Social Security.
Get the younger generation all whipped up and butthurt about the “olds” collecting what is characterized as “too much”. While the oligarchs bitch about “balancing the budget” by cutting services.
Instead of the fucking obvious option - lift the caps.
I wish I could downvote this article more than once.
Thank you for saving me the time and energy to say precisely that.
If the caps were removed, it would completely solve the problem.
That’s it.
Yet again, they try to divide us any way they can.
And it will be the same for when millennials are old enough to collect. That’s literally how it works. The fact that people are constantly trying to frame this, like it’s some kind of scam, is infuriating. Stop bullshitting people.
So I guess Fortune magazine just discovered inflation today? Fuck your dumb oligarch divisive bullshit, the only problem with Social Security is that the wealthiest haven’t been paying enough into it.
Baby boomers are collecting 265% of what they paid into Social Security
A median-wage worker retiring in 2027 can expect about $730,000 in lifetime Social Security benefits, compared with less than $200,000 paid in taxes by that worker and their employer combined
Adjusting the $200k for inflation, that’s around $800k.
If anything, SS recipients should be getting back more than $730k. That’s deferred consumption which was recycled through public spending into increased domestic growth. Growth that the vast majority of these workers never got to see, as their salaries fell behind the inflation rate.
But ask the editors of Fortune Magazine what they think of uncapping the Social Security tax, so it applies to people making more than $180k/year. Ask them how they feel about paying for SS directly out of the General Fund, rather than getting a special Poor Tax that can’t be exempted through deductions and credits. Ask them how they feel about paying for SS out of an Equities Transaction Tax, such that trillionaires issuing the next round of IPOs take responsibility for the millions of senior citizens who they are brain-fucking with AI slop on a daily basis.
Social Security is the promise this country (kinda-sorta) makes to its elderly. If you worked your whole life, you won’t be impoverished the day your employer doesn’t consider you a value-add anymore. The taxation scheme for SS is fucked, but only because it taxes labor income rather than labor value. We’ve seen the gross wealth in this country rise from $2.2T to $167T between 1960 and 2027. And you’re telling me we’re running out of money to pay our retirees?
Fuck off. Anyone should be able to see through this bullshit.
The most obvious slight of hand here is the suggestion that employer contributions shouldn’t count as part of what employees paid in. That is part of their compensation and shouldn’t be ignored when suggesting that younger generations are paying for baby boomer’s social security.
To me this reads like someone is trying to poison younger people against social security so they won’t complain when it is taken away.
Exactly. It is obvious that this is trying to lie to you, because of course employees should be entitled to the employer match that employers paid into SS. If SS were a private fund, then those retirement funds would have been earning interest and the payors should be entitled to interest on their savings. “But, the index fund is paying you out more than you put in!!! The stock market will run out of moeny!” No, that is exactly what index funds, and retirement funds, are suppose to do.
I think just like the US Secret Service, Social Security is… uh… not fond of the acronym… ;-)
Eliminate the cap or eliminate the fuckin problem
The media sure is pushing the “cut social security and medicare” narrative this month — instead of pointing out that yearly military budget is $1 trillion.
Let’s be clear, every generation should get more than they put into it by working, because they’re still paying taxes as well. Also, we all buy our own healthcare for the most part. This is a shitty, shitty, comparison.
The promise of retirement for Millennials is just a mirage. Conservatives keep sabotaging social security even thogh it has worked for 3 generations.
Eh, Gen X told each other that sort of thing for years, and believe me, I stashed the maximum I possibly could in things like 401K when I could because of that sentiment.
Gen Y stands to be the benefactors of the largest wealth transfer in history, by the way. It won’t be equally distributed, but still.
https://www.bordencastle.com/finance/society/2026/03/15/the-great-wealth-transfer.html
The numbers are staggering enough to seem unreal: roughly $84 trillion in assets will transfer from Baby Boomers to younger generations over the next 20 years. To put it in perspective, that’s more than three times the current U.S. GDP. It’s the single largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in recorded history, and it has been quietly building momentum for years.
Eh, Gen X told each other that sort of thing for years
Oh! So, the problem has been known about for decades and not fixed? Broken as the Epstein class intended and bribed the politicians to have happen.
Gen Y stands to be the benefactors of the largest wealth transfer in history, by the way. It won’t be equally distributed, but still.
You think something will pass like that? The Epstein class will have drained it all with the Boomers’ retirement/elderly care. The Millennials won’t get anything from their parents.
The biggest wealth transfer in history has already started. Not sure what you think will drain it all. In some cases, the parents started giving it to them before they passed…
I wouldn’t call Inheritance a wealth transfer, that term is pretty much only used for compelled forced transfers (taxes, increased prices for tariffs, etc).
Its its own thing, and it will be weird
Budget watchdog
Three conservative bootstraps penny-pinchers in a trenchcoat.
They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Come and get some
Skinning the children for a war drum
Putting food on the table selling bombs and guns
It’s quicker and easier to eat your young
