Recent political discourse has mentioned the survivability of the Trust Fund. These comments relate to Old Age benefits and Medicare. What none of the politicos tell you is that they are to blame–not one party or the other–but BOTH PARTIES. Here’s what’s happened…Employers and employees contribute into the SSA and Medicare Trusts from paychecks. Since 1936–when SSA became law and 1966–when Medicare became law, billions of dollars have been deposited into the trusts. But those dollars do not stay in the trusts. The Federal Government “borrows” those greenbacks and replaces them with low interest rate bearing Federal notes. Over the years those low interest securities have not kept up with the number of retirees or the escalating cost of medical care for seniors. If those dollars had been invested in either the Dow Jones Industrial Stock Market or the S & P 500 largest companies in the US the SSA trust Fund would have been approximately 10 times as large as it was at the end of 2022. The same can be said for Medicare trust funds. Moral of the story: bad investments by unqualified politicians have created this mess and any fix for those systems need to change that investment strategy.
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