I think that the Gulch has shown in the past that a moderate investment strategy would outstrip the S.S. return by a very wide margin. So all of that money, taken by force, is not only a rip-off, but to add insult to injury, a Ponzi scheme as well. You didn't go wrong. Your country did.

Old Dino with some health issues now lives off his retirement plan and secondarily his SS. Should my SS go poof for any reason, I'll be hurting.
There are lots of senior citizens who worked all their lives and refused to mooch in the same boat.
This fact should not be taken out of the equation should a big time fix be made.

They are trying to kill us. He was right.

It's a Ponzi scheme, and an excellent political football. The average schmo doesn't understand it, nor can they do the math to see that they've been duped.

With the current social security tax rate including the part that the employer pays as part of your compensation at 12.4% that's a significant portion of the money that you could otherwise invest for your own retirement.

It is far too large of a percent as a premium on a subsistence survival for the truly destitute.

I saw something on that just the other day. They're claiming that it's 'only' 70%. It' projected to be 140% by 2025, and that's higher thangreece today.

True dat!

Bernie Madoff was a piker by comparison to the pack of jackals in DC.

The current bumper crop of fiscal illiterates seem to feel that the limit on borrowing can be ignored because at a nominal 3% inflation rate, we'll "grow" our way out of debt. In fact, when you read some of the proposals for new spending, that's exactly the calculus that they use and you'll see the expression 'revenue neutral' meaning they want us to believe that this new scheme won't cost us a dime. In fact, we'll probably make money on it! Of course, this ignores the fact that compounding works in BOTH directions.

All kidding aside Michael, if you try to apply these Keynesian principles to what you see government doing, the dots seem to get easier to connect.

Case in point: My Father was at Pearl when they hit it, so he had a pretty up-close idea about the realities of war. My time was Vietnam, a war that Dad passionately hated. When I joined the Navy, Dad (who told me that if my draft number was low, take off for Canada. I'll worry about the law.) said, "Don't you get it, son? They're trying to kill you!" Think about that...war increases the death rate, so it's good for Social Security...less people collecting at the far end, and lower unemployment rates at home. Now doesn't that put a whole new wheel on the wagon when we consider our wars in the sand box going on for 15 years?

By the way...I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, odds are it's a duck and we'd be fools to believe otherwise.

Social Security is essentially a ponzi scheme. The whole foundation rests upon the bedrock of there being 35 workers in the system for every retiree. In order for the system to work, three things must be and remain true: 1) The birth rate must remain constant or increase. 2) The death rate must remain constant or increase. 3) the number of people entering and remaining in the workforce must remain constant or increase. Any violation of any of these three premises would lead to dire consequences. A violation of any two would prove fatal to the system. We currently have consistently violated all three. Couple that with short-sighted administrations who saw that there was a surplus when times were fat...and they immediately started give away programs and tapped into the surplus without any regard of lean times, such as now.

Now add to that the concept of Keynesian economics, which requires inflation to work. It's all smoke and mirrors, because if tomorrow it will take $2 to purchase what $1 will buy today, who cares if you're growing at 100%? Relatively speaking, you've gotten nowhere. In fact, you're actually falling behind, because if government is taking 27%, the dollar amount you're losing to taxes is increasing exponentially.

All this to say, Michael, that none of this is your fault. That of course is meaningless, because it most definitely is your problem. And sadly, rich man, poor man, begger man, thief...we're all in the same bind.

When you started investing in your 401k and IRA, the American government was far more trustworthy than it is now. The problem is that governments change so drastically over a person's lifetime. And people wonder why I don't build chemical engineering plants expected to last 20+ years anymore.

To be fair to you, you really had no choice in the matter. Pay up, or go to jail. That's not really a great set of options.

You were told by your financial advisor to expect a reasonable return on investment on conservative investments like bonds. That would be reasonable in a country that viewed its citizenry with respect, but instead you were viewed as an easy target by the looters.