Elon Musk calls Social Security ‘the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time’

Oh, so SS is a ponzi scheme now? Well then, I hope you do something about that, Musk. And then I'd like my tens of thousands of dollars that were taken from my paycheck back, please. After all, if I paid into the system and I haven't used any benefits yet since I'm not at retirement age, you should be able to pay me back after you seek recompense from all the "mispayments" going on, right?
This is the billionaire class trying to do a rug pull. Don't believe their accusations of fraud and abuse, they're doing anything they can except raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for it. It's your money. You paid faithfully into the system. If they mismanaged the funds by borrowing against it to fuel military quagmires all around the world, that's a "them" problem. Hold the government accountable and do not let them cancel your retirement entitlements.

Elon Musk called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” claiming it’s unsustainable due to long-term obligations exceeding tax revenue.
Being a Ponzi scheme requires fraud. In a Ponzi scheme, the fraudster fraudulently claims that an investor is making a larger return than he is, then -- for a while -- pays him back from future investments from other investors. It is intrinsically unsustainable.
Social Security isn't fraudulent. It states explicitly that people contributing to Social Security are providing the funds to people who are withdrawing from it. It may not be sustainable to maintain a fixed level of benefits at a fixed level of taxation if the fertility rate is declining, but the lack of sustainability isn't what makes a Ponzi scheme a Ponzi scheme. It's the presence of fraud, which does not exist for Social Security.
I remember that the Social Security Administration website used to have a page up explicitly describing why it wasn't a Ponzi scheme.

"Full self-driving"

Is it possible that every single day I wake up, open Lemmy and get new outraging bullshit from this fantastic duo? Where they get those insane ideas? Don't they get tired? Go to play golf or so

You know what, if they destroy Social Security just because Musk said so, I have no doubt there will be blood. Too many people from too many demographics in too many places rely on it just to SURVIVE, let alone abuse it in any meaningful way.
This would honestly be one of, if not the fastest ways to spark a civil war, outside of rolling troops into major cities and opening fire. Why? Because you'd suddenly have millions of people unable to feed themselves, in a country where there are significantly more guns than people, and they'd all have ample cause to march on DC.
THAT SAID, I doubt Musk and Trump have thought of that, because they're 2 drug-addled lunatics who do not and never have cared about long-term ramifications. I'm sure other Republicans are shitting themselves in fear right now, as the Dipshit Duo get ready to kill the Political Golden Goose, but none of them can speak up for fear of losing power.
What a fucking mess.

It's one of the most popular social programs in American history. It's also OUR FUCKING MONEY ELON.

Does he feel like way about all pension programs or just the ones he is trying to plunder?

The favorite dumb argument from the guys who constantly defraud governments via tax dodging and subsidies.
Despicable thief and con man.

Elon is a anamorphic Ponzi scheme.

Alternative headline: expert on ponzi schemes bemoans what he sees as competition

Social security is never going to "run out" it's continuously funded, that's how it works. America lacks curiosity and an attention span beyond a couple seconds. Conservatives loudly accuse (while projecting), demand detailed explanation and then immediately become disinterested in the explanation they demanded - mostly because they can't comprehend the basic concepts and their eyes glaze over. For the most part they are unserious, homicidal and suicidal and just looking for an excuse to have an outburst.
Don't let them leech your energy trying to explain or debate. They don't know or care what you are talking about.
- It can run out if the amount if money being distributed exceeds the amount of money being collected. Such as when there are a large number of retirees (the "baby boomer" generation is much larger then the one preceeding it) or fewer workers (eg. if immigration slows or birthrates drop).
  
  The point is that it won't. Your internet could torn off next ninth if you don't pay your fucking bill... But you pay your FUCKING bill. There's no validity in your position. It's a right wing propaganda talking point - you're either ignorant of that or complicit in it. Either way, do better.

If Musk dislikes "Ponzi schemes," maybe start by rejecting government subsidies for his ventures.
🐱🐱
- No no no, not like that. - Moscow musk

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.
- SSA publishes some cool solvency estimates for proposed policy changes. It looks like for payroll taxes, though eliminating the taxable maximum helps, some payroll tax rate increase is needed to sustain it long-term.
- What is their counter argument, would it increase the velocity of money and inflation, raising interest rates for everyone and inhibiting economic growth? Or would it be that we'd need to raise capital gains taxes, which would cause US investment to flee?
  
  There is no real counterargument, because they don't need one.
  
  The argument is it’s not a tax or insurance but a communal retirement fund meant to supplement private retirement benefits or keep the elderly out of poverty. It’s limited in what it pays out so your investment should be limited at the same place
  People who earn $176k get the highest benefit, and they don’t get anymore no matter how much more they earn. They’re not getting more so don’t think they should pay in more.
  I don’t know how the benefit is calculated but presumable if higher earners kick in more, the formula would need to change so it’s not all going back to them

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.
- How should it be run, like a Keynesian, an MMT, a monetarist, something else?
  
  MMT is how it's currently run, and that's fine if we didn't schizophrenically fuck up that path every four years by trying to pretend taxes pay for spending like a business.
  Realistically, though, the government should just distribute the resources necessary for life, utilizing whatever means necessary to obtain and redistribute those resources equally without harming anyone's basic human rights.
  Money, currency, etc is for trading with outside forces. That's what it was developed for. Trade with people you don't trust. For the majority of human history local economies ran entirely without currency being involved, with it only being needed for trade. It was fine, it was better locally.
  We can even more easily implement a sharing or trust based local economy now that computers are a thing, and we can easily distribute and equalize necessary resources for the same reason.
  Except then you couldn't obtain capital, and couldn't rent things. And without rent you can't become obscenely rich. So we can't have that.

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.
- Yep. It’d be inconvenient for them to note that the funding issues are primarily driven by increasing concentration of income which falls above the Social Security withholding cap. If they’d just remove that cap, then no issue.

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.
- “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.
- Only recently?
  Biden attacked social security in the 90s.

Send that nazi back to South Africa
- Put that thing back where it came from or so help meeeee
- 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.
- Better off being sent up to join Willzyx

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.
- Yeah no, he's wrong. Government is not a for-profit venture. When you are providing services to citizens, it's not a scam.
  
  And a very merry fuel subsidy to you as well.
- 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.
- I mean, this system only works if we keep reproducing 2.5:1 factor. I don't want to condemn anyone to this world, so he is right. And with the birth rates lowering this is gonna be a serious problem, for most zoomers and alphas.
  
  We could increase immigration.

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?
- The existence of disability insurance (SSDI), in and of itself, is enough to refute this "ponzi scheme" bullshit.
  There are people who have never paid a cent into Social Security, yet receive benefits.
  Imagine that with an actual ponzi scheme... Instead of giving Peter's money to Paul, you give it to Sally who's paraplegic,, can't work, and has paid nothing into the fund.
- 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.

Lol Bro doesn't know what a Ponzi Scheme is
- 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.
- 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.

Didnt Reagan under a conservative government allow the money to be spent, in order to pay for the debt left over after the great society act?
It therefore would now be a ponzi scheme, where past investors pay new investors, until the outflows outpace inflows and it fails.
- No, what happened during the Reagan administration is that the government recognized that decades in the future, the predicted change in the age pyramid would mean more retirees and fewer workers to support them. So rather than slightly increasing SS taxes in the future to cover this, they started increasing SS taxes immediately and investing that overpayment in Treasury bonds (this is the origin of the Social Security "trust fund" which is routinely misrepresented as the entirely of the SS system). This SS trust fund money is primarily what allowed Reagan to run enormous deficits ("fiscal conservative" lol) without causing interest rates to spiral out of control.
  There is absolutely nothing about Social Security which is in any way like a Ponzi scheme. It is simply a pension plan applied to the whole country instead of just an individual company.
  
  Ah interesting, thanks for the correction. Though since treasuries are paid by the government is it not then still a ponzi scheme, in the fact the bonds must be redeemed to pay for shortfalls, in which case the government must tax the existing population to pay for the redeemed bond to fund the old?
  If we are looking at our existing scenario with the baby boomers I'd assume we must be close to being forced to liquidate, and taxes will rise on the young for the bond repayment?
  If they allowed people to opt out would it not be the case that as people opt out you'd need to raise taxes on the young as more people opted out, since none of the money actually still exists, cascading into an insolvent system just like how a standard ponzi scheme unwinds?

Okay crypto-fascist whatever you say

Says the guy who made most of his fortune on taxpayer money and hype.

Should have listened to Al Gore: Lockbox
- What a different world we would be in if Florida didn't fuck up in 2000
  
  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
  
  Had FL simply not allowed Jeb to chair the committee to elect his brother in FL…

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).

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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles/_Ponzi
- 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.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal
- 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.

you would know

Lol moron doesn't know what a Ponzi Scheme is.
Hang on... I... I have an idea. 😈

The more news I read the more I think of judge dredd as the future for the USA.
Corporate Takeover of Government
Elon Musk and DOGE and the budget cuts, like a megacorp executive running essential public services for profit.
Trump & Musk pushing privatization, bust like how corporations in Judge Dredd control everything from housing to law enforcement.
Weakening Social Safety Nets
Cutting Social Security, making healthcare deniable based on religious beliefs (Arkansas bill), reducing government services looks like pushing society toward a survival-of-the-fittest model to me.
The rich live in luxury, while everyone else is left to fend for themselves like the division in Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One.
Authoritarianism & the Rule of the Few
Trump’s policies, Vance’s ideology, Musk’s influence, the US is shifting toward rule by billionaires and strongmen, bypassing democratic institutions.
The Rise of Private Justice & Armed Control
Musk’s obsession with tech-based policing & surveillance (like Neuralink, AI, and robot enforcement) eerily mirrors corporate-controlled law enforcement in dystopian fiction.
- And worst of all, Rob Schneider is there.

Who?

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.

Fuck you, Incel King. Go eat your own shit and die.