social security
...n you pay social security taxes you are in no way making provision for your own retirement. You are paying the pensions of those who already are retired. Once you understand this, you see that whether you will get the benefits you are counting on when you retire depends on whether the Congress will levy enough taxes, borrow enough, or print enough money, and whether it will authorize the level of benefits you are counting on. The situation is in no way analogous to putting money each month into a private insurance company ...". How many college students would be eager to keep their Social Security Number and volunteer to pay F.I.C.A. taxes if they fully realized the impact of this? Today’s undergraduates, including those attending the finest institutions of higher learning, are not being taught the voluntary nature of social security or the consequences of applying for permission to become a "taxpayer", eligible for federal benefits. Why do you suppose that is? Could the influence of federally guaranteed loans for expansion, federally guaranteed student loans and Pell grants have any bearing or influence on the willingness of college administrations to teach the truth? Or is it actually possible that none of the tens of thousands of college professors and administrators - including those in our nations’ finest Ivy League Law schools - has ever read the social security statutes? I’ll leave this to you to speculate. Traditional retirement plans — the monthly checks our parents and grandparents got from Conglomcorp after they hit 65 — have been totally trashed since the 1980s. Reagan-era deregulation encouraged companies to steal their employees' pension funds. Often these companies went bankrupt in failed leveraged buyouts, taking their workers' pensions along with their jobs. These days, younger workers find that pensions are history; fewer than 25 percent of corporate employees work at places that offer them. Many places don't offer any post-employment benefits whatsoever. Among those that do, the "retirement plan" of choice is the 401(k), in which the company withholds a percentage of your paycheck and invests it with a money manager of its choosing. Two problems with that scenario: First, there's nothing to prevent your boss from looting your money, and it happens all the time. Second, no one monitors the skill or goodwill of the manager. Third, the withheld funds are tax-deferred, not tax-exempt. You don't pay income tax on this amount, but you do when you retire or quit. If the income tax rate happens to drop by then, you'll reap big savings. Right. No one stays at the same company long enough to retire on a 401(k). In reality, people use their 401(k) checks — which usually don't amount to much — as extra spending money each time they leave a job. Big companies like AT∓T are shedding millions of jobs and openly telling workers not to expect long-term employment. As the gold watch fades in our national consciousness, employer-based retirement plans make less and less sense. Self-employed workers are the fastest-growing segment of the workforce — they make up roughly a third of all Americans, most of them under 40 — and none of these people pay into 401(k)s or even the failing Social Security system. That leaves personal savings and investments. We all know Americans...