If Musk dislikes "Ponzi schemes," maybe start by rejecting government subsidies for his ventures.
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this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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His bullshit he's spouting isn't even true. US life expectancy hasn't even increased at all over the past 20 years, and has only gone up by like 7 years over the past 50 and they've increased retirement age since then.
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you would know
Conservatives think the government should be run like a business. You're not buying or selling anything, the point is to serve the people you fucks.
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The 2025 earnings tax cap for social security is $176k.
If those richest among us, like Elon who makes billions per year, had to pay social security tax on a larger percentage of their earnings, or on all of it like those of us making less than $176k annually, the system would easily be solvent in perpetuity. The only reason it’s potentially at risk is because rich assholes have lobbied successfully in order to not pay into it.
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Should have listened to Al Gore: Lockbox
What a different world we would be in if Florida didn't fuck up in 2000
Had FL simply not allowed Jeb to chair the committee to elect his brother in FL…
What a different world we would be in if ~~Florida didn't fuck up in 2000~~ jeb bush and the Supreme Court didn't steal the election in 2000
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What an idiot. Tons of rich people know that social security is a riot tax (it's not but that's how they see it).
Oh he is surely referring to our reliance on perpetual population growth and being the genius he is, I’m sure he has the solution of how to fund it with a shrinking population.
/s
Well he does have a large part of the solution. Not in his mind, in his hoard. End the payment limit, take the tax percentages back to the Reagan years, and he and the other billionaires would be funding it without breaking a sweat.
I mean, in a way he’s not wrong. The money gets funneled from all of us all the way to the top.
But the thing is, the money does get distributed - all of it. The Ponzi at the top is us again, stealing from it to pay for infrastructure or defense spending.
And that is fine because that type of scheme with a large moat is called insurance. And so long as we can continue to pay out distributions, it is solvent.
But it isn’t solvent, because premiums haven’t kept up with payouts and the payouts for the baby boomers are massive. And if we don’t take some kind of action (e.g. increased premiums, disqualification for the rich, increase the benefit age) then payouts will eventually need to decrease.
Actually, the remedy Social Security needs is to remove the income cap. Elon Musk pays just as much into social security as I do: ~$10,900
It's because there's a cap: $176,100. Once you earn that much in income you don't have to pay into social security anymore! It's ridiculous!
Basically, the richer you are, the less you're paying into social security as a percentage of your income. It's the opposite of progressive (just like HSAs).
Remove the cap and people like Musk will be paying millions into Social Security every year. It'll make it solvent again in no time at all.
That's exactly why the Republicans have been trying to dismantle it. The only solution that's not going to get you voted out of office is the one that gets your reelection funding cut off.
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Fuck you, Incel King. Go eat your own shit and die.
Lol moron doesn't know what a Ponzi Scheme is.
Hang on... I... I have an idea. 😈
Who?
claiming it’s unsustainable due to long-term obligations exceeding tax revenue.
Dude literally took over the system that allows the government to create money out of thin air, tellin us the government’s gonna run out of money.
Also, your fake department is named after the first meme coin. Which you tried to pump-and-dump on live TV. Ponzi-scheming motherfucker.
@MicroWave Ponzi schemes by their nature are short-lived; According to Wikipedia, Charles Ponzi's original scheme ran just over a year before collapsing. All pyramid schemes require a pool of investors that is constantly expanding, which is not the situation with Social Security.
This is pseudo-science. There's nothing in the "nature" of ponzi schemes that makes them "short-lived", because these terms are subjective and unscientific. Many ponzi schemes have lasted for much longer than the original. See also global capitalism.
With social security, the pool of investors is the entire country's population. This large size and government backing stabilises it. But the financials still rely on continuous population growth, forever, to work well.
The key financial metric in social security is the ratio of pay-ins to pay-outs. For example, it could be 5 paying employees for every retiree. The social security scheme has some minimum, critical ratio that is needed to maintain the tax rates and benefit levels. And if that minimum is, say, 5:1 workers to older retirees, that implies a population in a state of exponential demographic growth.
Right now, the US is propping up its lack of organic demographic growth with immigration, and accumulated trust fund savings from an earlier era. Japan had massive problems with its social security when its population stagnated.
Notice, however, that the government of Japan did not just implode like a securities fraud. This is because governments are fundamentally not like private sector criminals running Ponzi schemes.
And if that minimum is, say, 5:1 workers to older retirees, that implies a population in a state of exponential demographic growth.
Well, not necessarily; it relies on the average person working for 5x as long as they spend retired. If we start working at 20, and retire at 65, and the ratio is 5:1, then it allows for an average of 9 years of retirement per person before we die. The problem is that now people are living a lot longer than they were in the 1920s, which is why there's been discussion if raising the benefits age to 70. This would allow for 10 years of benefits, taking us to an average lifespan of 80 (which happens to be just about what the average lifespan in the US actually is.)
If the population is stagnant, but the age distribution remains steady, this would let the system self-sustain. It becomes problematic when there's a higher ratio of retirees to people just entering the workforce, though.
Lol Bro doesn't know what a Ponzi Scheme is
The entire stock market is basically a ponzi scheme.
Push pensions, 401k, 529, HSA money into one spot and then rug the whole market every few years.
He doesn't know what almost anything really is, despite all the bullshit he spouts. He's the human embodiment of the Dunning Kruger effect.
Says the guy who made most of his fortune on taxpayer money and hype.
I understand what he is saying. It kinda looks like one at first glance, because contributions from current workers go first to pay current retirees.
But what he misses is that we did it that way on purpose. The end goal was to make Americans more secure as a country. Americans could work at their jobs and be confident that they would be taken care of in their old age by the younger generation as a whole, Americans taking care of each other. I understand that the money I pay in now is going to support my parents and their generation, and I really dont mind. We'll see if these dimwits ruin it by the time I need it.
Everything with these MAGA idiots is zero-sum. If they are paying money to anyone, they need to be the ones getting the benefits from it, otherwise it is a "scam". The problem with zero-sum is that there always have to be winners and losers. And if the people in power are always the winners, what does that make us?
He is in charge of this debacle. He needs to give it more than a first glance
I understand what he is saying. It kinda looks like one at first glance, because contributions from current workers go first to pay current retirees.
But that's how private insurance and retirement plans work too. The only difference is that private ones also benefit some rich CEOs at the top who have a vested interest to not distribute the funds.
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It's not a Ponzi Scheme when there's nobody standing to profit you dumb fucking idiot fuck. It's been getting funded for almost 100 years, and has only recently been under fire by assholes like you who accumulate wealth and remove it from being eligible for such a social safety net. Now you're worried we're coming for yours and Rogan's money to fund it, and we will.
Y'all need to stop listening to these morons pal around and podcasts. They mean to harm you and your families, and take away the already middling social programs that benefit you, not them.
Only recently?
Biden attacked social security in the 90s.
“If I’m not getting rich off it, someone else is.”
That’s how conservatives, from the rich to the poor, see the world.
It’s not just recently, conservatives have been threatening social security for decades.
Recently as in the last few decades. Reagan pretty much started all this bullshit, and it's been a tug of war since.
Send that nazi back to South Africa
Unfortunately US Republicans are Nazi's. Another sad thing is our society is too stupid to see the similarities as well as afraid calling a spade a spade.
US Republicans are Nazi's.
Put that thing back where it came from or so help meeeee
Better off being sent up to join Willzyx