[00:00:00] Intro: Forget the civilized path. It’s time to break the chains of debt and dependency, take control of our financial lives, and live free. This is the Fiscally Savage Podcast.

[00:00:15] Dylan Bain: Hello and welcome to Fiscally Savage. I’m your host, Dylan Bain. And Happy Friday, everybody. If you’re new here, on our Friday shows, we take something in the news and go two or three steps deeper. And today, I’m gonna be talking about a topic that is considered to be the third rail of politics, which of course is Social Security. And I’m talking about Social Security today because, unless you live under a rock, you should know that the United States government has hit the debt ceiling. That is the limit of the amount of debt that the United States government allows itself to have. And as I explained on my show on the debt limit, that is the world’s stupidest game of chicken. Essentially, Congress tells the executive branch — that’s the president — “You need to spend this money,” then passes another law that tells the president he can’t spend that money, and then they hash it out for everyone else’s discomfort and their own entertainment. But I digress. The reason that Social Security is being brought up is that it’s an entitlement program from the New Deal era and it has been a conservative priority for as long as I’ve been alive — and much, much longer than that — to find some way to cut, reduce, or otherwise eliminate these types of entitlements. And it’s one of the things that is a constant political football in this country. And I actually think that part of the reason that Social Security is a political football and is brought up is because it gets headlines, because it’s scary, and because a lot of people don’t understand what Social Security really even is. And so, today, we’re going to actually dive into not only what is Social Security, but we’re gonna address some things that people say about it — like it’s going bankrupt, it’s exploding the federal debt, it’s a Ponzi scheme. None of these things are correct, ladies and gentlemen, but they’re constantly reported over and over and over again in the media. Why? Because the media has an agenda. That agenda is to make money and nothing sells like outrage and fear. 

[00:02:09] So, on today’s episode, what’s Social Security, and why should I be concerned? So, in brief — and as with all of these things that are horrendously complex, this is a primer. This is not a doctoral dissertation. And so, I’m going to gloss over things and massively oversimplify things. If you take issue with that, you can find me @fiscallysavage on Instagram. I’d love to have a conversation. So, you can pop over there, find me, and send me a message. Social Security is a pay-as-you-go pension system that was designed to help take care of people in their old age, the people who survived the death of a spouse, and for those who could no longer work. It’s paid for through a tax on payrolls, so this is separate. The one of the first things to understand is that the payroll tax is not the income tax. It’s the tax on your income, yes. But it’s not the one that goes towards paying things like the United States military, food stamps, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, or any of those other cabinet-level positions. That comes from income taxes. Social Security is paid through a payroll tax. Now, on your pay stub, you’ll see this. It’ll either be called FICA or it will be called OASDI or Old-Age, Survival, and Disability Insurance. And so, we’re gonna come back to the taxes a little bit later in this episode but understand that the important things here is that it’s a federal government pension system that applies to the vast majority of people in the United States that is structured as a pay-as-you-go program. And it got its start as part of the New Deal under FDR. It was the original act that authorized the collection of payroll taxes. And then the distribution of benefits was originally passed in 1935 under the FDR administration as part of the New Deal. It is really interesting to me to understand that at the time, Social Security was decried as a gigantic government takeover and socialism. And it’s just even more fascinating when you understand that the other Roosevelt who predated FDR, that would be Teddy Roosevelt, who established a national park system, which was also called as socialist or communist, Theodore Roosevelt also had another socialist idea, according to his critics at the time, which was universal healthcare, which we still don’t have in this country but a lot of other countries do. But this is, again, another one of these things that gets brought up and is denounced to socialism. So, this socialism tag for things we don’t like has been around for at least the last 120 years, but I digress. 

[00:04:45] Social Security, when it was passed in 1935, had the goal of providing a pension for those who could no longer work. It is important to understand that this is a Depression era program. That is to say that this was during one of the hardest economic times the United States has ever faced. And what happened for a lot of people is exactly what happens today when there’s layoffs: older employees get the boot. And older employees have a really hard time getting a new job. One of the statistics that I know in here in the United States is that at least 50% of the US workforce will be laid off by the time that they’re 55. And if they’re laid off in their fifties, 70% of those will not find another job to bring them back to the level at which they were laid off at. And so, in the Great Depression, when there was literally no social safety net, these people were just SOL. They just simply could not work. It’s not that they didn’t want to. They just couldn’t. They were old. They couldn’t dig ditches anymore. They weren’t learning new tricks, etc. etc. etc. You know how this goes. And so, Social Security was set up to say “It’s okay. We’re gonna take care of you” because it looks really bad to have old people dying in the streets, even if it is during an economic depression. 

[00:05:59] One of the factors of this type of program at the time was we didn’t have the infrastructure to actually create a government program on this scale. And so, we were kind of figuring it out as we went. And this is where the idea of the Social Security number comes from. Because the way that they decided to track this was to create a number and built within that number were certain identifiers for the year you were born and the location you were born. And we were gonna hand these cards off to people and that number was going to help us make and track those payments. Now, this turns out that as we’ve gone forward in time, it’s an absolutely terrible idea to run the program this way, particularly because we don’t have any other form of federal identification because, again, with the whole cries of socialism — if we had a federal identification system, then that’s the government tracking you and, you know, the sky will fall at every, you know, pretty soon, the Gestapo is at your door. There may be some validity to that. I’m not gonna deal with that on the show. But the point being is we don’t have any other way to track you on a large scale, so we used the Social Security number. And if you’ve ever been caught up in identity theft, you know why that’s a terrible idea and that will be an episode later I’m sure. But for right now, let’s go back to the actual original structure of Social Security. 

[00:07:14] Originally, when you received benefits from Social Security — that is, you’re getting the payout in your old age or in your disability — it wasn’t taxed. This was tax-free money because the idea was you’re done with your working age. You’ve already contributed to the growth of society as a tax-paying citizen. And now, you’re going to receive the money and it’s gonna be tax-free. That was until 1983 under President Ronald Reagan. When Reagan entered office, one of the things that he said he was gonna do and did was that he was gonna cut taxes because at the time, we had really rampant inflation. We had oil crises going on. And so, Reagan came in and said that he was gonna get America back to work again. And this is where the historical context that kind of dovetails with today. At the time. Paul Volcker, who was the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, continued to raise interest rates to fight inflation in the seventies. And his entire idea was that he was just gonna continue to ratchet them up until inflation stopped. And one of the questions that Paul Volcker was asked was “How high of unemployment are you willing to tolerate?” because that was what was happening as a result of his rate hikes. When Reagan came to office, in part because of that high unemployment and those very high interest rates, he said he would get America back to work again by cutting taxes. And so, the top tier tax rate, the most expensive tax rate in the progressive taxation system, was 73% and Reagan cut it to 28%, which was the lowest it had been since 1925. So, there’s two things to understand. Number one: Reagan had these tax cuts and he said they were going to pay for themselves. And so, he cut them to the lowest level since 1925. So, when people tell you that, well, Reagan cut taxes and they paid for themselves, just remember that three years later, he had to go back and tax Social Security benefits to pay for his tax cuts. The other thing to note here is that when people say taxes have never been higher, they’re both right in aggregate but not correct in absolutes because you can go back to 1980 when he was elected and note that the highest tax rate was 73%. 

[00:09:22] With anything related to Social Security, it’s so easy for me to get off track and go down the rabbit holes. And, again, with so many of these things, I read things so you don’t have to, so let’s get back on Social Security. Now, today, Social Security is nearly universal and that’s been a key to its success. It is hard to cut a program when literally almost everyone in the United States benefits from it at a certain time in their life. It’s so much easier when you can say, “Well, we’ll cut that program but I don’t feel the pain, so I don’t care.” And that is why Social Security has become what is considered the third rail of politics. That is, if you touch it, you will die. The benefits that come out of Social Security are calculated based upon your 35 years of highest earning. So, if you think about it, if all you ever worked were minimum wages jobs, then you’re going to have lower Social Security benefits against somebody who, in the back part years of their life, was a high-earning individual. And, of course, there is a cap that’s applied to that but that’s not as important right now. The other thing to understand about Social Security benefits — now, go back to that statistic I already quoted; that half of Americans will be laid off around age 55 — well, if you don’t ever recover your income, your Social Security benefits are going to be lower and you might actually have to claim it before full retirement age, which means that your benefits are also prorated based upon the age in which you claim it. The farther you put it off into your life, the more money you’re going to get. 

[00:10:52] Now, there’s some really interesting commentary on what is the best Social Security strategy. I’m not gonna get into that on today’s episode because I really wanna focus — now that we have some basis of understanding what Social Security is, how it works, and we’re gonna talk a lot more about how it’s funded — but I do wanna demystify some of the stuff that they say in the news. So, one of the things that’s come up in the debt ceiling fight is this idea that we have to make hard decisions and do what’s right at the time. I always hate it when politicians say this because they’re never serious but what they’re talking about is the idea that we’ve hit the debt ceiling and if we don’t address entitlements, they’re gonna continue to balloon and grow and they’re gonna take over the whole country. To understand why people say this and why it might not actually be as true as they want you to believe is to understand how Social Security is funded. Now, if you remember as when I said at the top of the show Social Security is a pay-as-you-go pension system, which means that when the money comes in from Social Security — that is, when you are paid and you pay part of the payroll tax, your company’s gonna pay the other half — those benefits then go to the Social Security Administration and are then paid out to grandma. So, my grandmother, my father as well are being paid by you if you are a taxpayer paying the payroll tax. Or if you’re an employer paying the payroll tax, well, my grandmother and my father and, soon, my mother all thank you. Because that’s exactly what’s happening with the money. It goes into the system. It goes out of the system. That is what pay-as-you-go means. Originally, when Social Security was started, the payroll tax was 2%. That’s it. 2% with a cap of $3,000. Okay? And I’ll get to what a cap means here in a second. But it’s also important to understand that half is paid by you and the other half is paid by your employer if you’re subject to the cap. It’s currently 12.4%, again, typically split between you and your employer. When people talk about the self-employment tax, what they’re talking about is the fact that if you are self-employed, you have to pay both sides of it. It’s an interesting artifact within the US Tax Code that the place where we tax people the most is right here when they try to be self-employed, whether as a sole proprietor or through an LLC, because they have to pay both sides of the payroll tax. And there’s ways to get around this. This is why you hire CPAs to do your taxes. But it’s just an interesting thing to note that this pension system is somewhat of a disincentive for people to become self-employed.

[00:13:22] Now, you might be asking yourself, well, hold on, Dylan. If this is a pay-as-you-go system and the baby boomers for the longest time were the largest generation and they were paying into the system during the most prosperous time in American history, well, was there any leftover? And the answer is, well, yeah. Social Security has run at a surplus for the majority of its history. And you might be asking yourself, well, hold on a second. What happens if the young don’t outnumber the old? Because stop and think about that. For this system to work, you need a smaller population of older folks being supported by a larger population of younger folks. And if you know anything about demographics, you know that that number has switched over. The United States has been below replacement levels for a long time. The only reason that our population growth is actually at replacement level is because of things like immigration. And unless you lived under Iraq, you know that President Trump was not such a big fan of that and put a severe dent into that immigration. So, as it stands right now, United States population is no longer growing at replacement levels. So, if you’re Social Security and you’re relying on the population to continue to grow so that the young outnumber the old, you would be in serious trouble when that starts to reverse. If you need a greater reference for that, go check out Japan. 

[00:14:42] Now, the government, with any of the leftover money, when Social Security runs at a surplus, you probably have heard, “Well, the government is going in and raiding Social Security and taking that money away from you.” And like so many things when it comes to government finance, it’s as right as it’s not. The government is actually legally bound from assigning Social Security monies to itself. It is considered an off-balance sheet item. Okay? So, when the government sits down and figures out how what it’s gonna spend, it doesn’t get to bring Social Security money into it, even though it’s a government program. ‘Cause remember the government spending is divided into several different buckets. What we talk about typically as government spending is US discretionary spending, which includes the US military and all the rest of the cabinet positions for the presidency. Social Security, though, is called mandatory spending and there are three other different divisions of that and it is paid for by the payroll tax. The government can’t just take that money and put it into discretionary spending. But — and, of course, you knew there was a but coming — the reason people say that the government raids Social Security is that the Social Security trust fund is required to do something called buying treasuries. What are treasuries? It’s debt issued by the United States government. So, in this way, the Social Security Administration has a surplus. They create a trust fund. They buy US government debt. So, now, the US government has a debt to Social Security to pay out to retirees. So, now, they’re getting interest rate on that money. And the government was able to hold down interest rates on US treasuries in order to be able to fund obligations that they made in the US discretionary budget. If that seems really convoluted to you, it’s not but it is a circular system, okay? So, it’s a way that the government found to work around them being legally barred from moving the excess money out of the Social Security Administration. So, what that means is that the money in the Social Security trust fund is actually part of the national debt. Most people don’t fully understand that the US national debt is majorily owed to the United States itself. About a quarter of it’s just accounting transactions — that is, intergovernmental spending — and a significant percentage of it is what the government owes to Social Security because Social Security bought US government debt. Now, it’s important to understand that when the trust fund does this, it is not contributing to the national debt. It’s buying the national debt. It’s not spending that’s jacking up the debt number. It’s buying that encourages the debt number to go up. So, this is one of these things that can be kind of a hard thing to wrap your head around but it’s also important to understand when you’re listening to politicians going, “Social Security is contributing to debt.” Well, yeah. It’s buying it like the rest of the investors on the market. 

[00:17:39] Now, well, you might think like, okay. Well, hold on a second. We have these baby boomers and the baby boomers, you know, funded their parents’ retirements. And so, we have this huge trust fund, right? Well, the thing about the trust fund is that it has never really actually had to been used to pay benefits except for a period of time in 2008. In 2008 if you remember was the Great Recession and what they did was they, the question for the Obama administration at the time was “How can we get people’s pockets to be bigger as fast as humanly possible?” That is, how can I put money into people’s hands in the fastest, most efficient way possible? And what they decided to do was to suspend the payroll tax as a stimulus because the infrastructure was already there. They just had to stop collecting the money. And so, in 2008, we suspended the payroll tax. So, in that period of time, no money was coming in or at least not as much money was coming in to the Social Security Administration. And so, during that time of the suspension, the trust fund was used to pay benefits. It is one of the only times in this country’s history since we’ve had Social Security where we’ve actually had to dip into the trust fund to pay benefits. And the thing to note here is that starting in 2020, the curve bent. We’re no longer contributing to the trust fund. The amount of money that we’re bringing in is starting to decrease, which means pretty soon, we’re gonna have to dip into this trust fund again. But it’s not because we suspended the payroll tax this time in order to create a stimulus. It’s because our demographics are starting to catch up with the program. 

[00:19:11] Now, this is the point in which people say “Aha! Social Security is gonna go bankrupt and you’re never gonna collect on it.” I had been told that my entire life and once I looked into it, it turned out it’s completely false. Remember the system is a pay-as-you-go pension. It can’t go bankrupt. The trust fund can dry up and that’s going to happen but it’s a pay-as-you-go system. So, so long as there’s people in the United States who are working and employed paying the payroll tax, money will flow through the Social Security Administration. And it’s important to understand that as the current projections look, Social Security isn’t going to contribute to the debt when the trust fund runs out. It’s only gonna be able to pay what it has, which calculates out anywhere between 70-80% of what it’s supposed to pay out. And so, it’s just gonna be a reduction in benefits, not that the system’s gonna go bankrupt because it literally can’t. Now, the fear is — and Republicans share this fear but Democrats have pointed this out already because they’ve already floated the idea because, of course, they did — is that when the trust fund runs out and Social Security can’t pay full benefits, there will be a public outcry and demand that the government fill in the gap. If that were to occur, then it would be debt-fueled and then Social Security would be contributing to the national debt. But it is fundamentally dishonest for people to say that currently, under the current system, Social Security is now or ever has contributed to the national debt when it has not. It’s not structurally capable of doing so because it is a pay-as-you-go system. And up until recently, we’ve always brought in more than we needed to pay out. And so, it can’t go bankrupt and it’s not exploding the debt. 

[00:20:55] But you might be sitting there thinking, well, hold on a second. Can we fix that? And the answer is kind of. Here’s what most people will say. One of the things to note about the payroll tax is that it’s subject to a cap. Now, remember when I said Social Security started out at 2% and the cap of $3,000. So, if you made $2,500 at the time when Social Security started, you paid that 2% — well, you paid 1% and your employer paid the other percent — but 2% was paid up until $3,000. On the 3,001st dollar, you no longer had to pay the payroll tax. And that’s important because as time has gone on, that cap clearly has moved. The cap currently stands at $160,000. After that point, no payroll tax is collected. And it’s important to understand that there’s a couple of things to know. Number one, if we scrap the cap, it would fund Social Security for the foreseeable future and it wouldn’t require an increase in tax rates but it would require people to pay payroll tax on all of their income if they’re a W-2 employee or they’re self-employed. 

[00:22:02] But there’s an interesting thing to note about this cap. And this is where I’m gonna break one of the rules of podcasting ’cause I’m gonna talk about math when you can’t see it. Payroll taxes having a cap actually decreases employment in an economy. And it’s a weird thing because when you start looking actually at like the economics of employment and how it all fits together, it’s like staring into the void and realizing the void’s staring back to you. And I’m gonna explain to you how this works. I want you to imagine for a moment that you have a company and the company has three employees and all three of those employees make exactly the Social Security cap. So, all of them are making $160,000 a year. That’s a total of $480,000 a year for the company. That’s what they’re paying in salary. And in payroll taxes, the company has to pay $30,000 in payroll taxes for their three employees that are making exactly the cap. So, here’s what you gotta remember. Three employees at 160K cost 30K. Alright. Now, if you’re an enterprising person and you go to your accountants and say, “Hey, I need a way to save money and I need all the work still to be done but I wanna save money and I wanna save it in taxes.” Well, the accountant might say to you, “Well, that’s easy. Fire one of the other guys and take his salary and his workload and split it in two between the two remaining guys.” So, now, instead of three guys, I have two. And instead of making 160K, they’re making 240K. So, in salary, the company isn’t spending any more money. But now, because of that payroll tax cap, they’re only paying 20K in payroll taxes. So, by firing one person and splitting their work into two people, they save $10,000 in taxes. And you might think to yourself, well, okay. But the salary isn’t good and do companies actually do that? And the answer is you bet your sweet ass companies do this because they don’t actually split the salary. And anybody who’s been through workforce reductions where suddenly they got quietly hired for a quarter of somebody else’s job knows their pay didn’t go up because typically, if I was the person, I wouldn’t sit there and say, “Hey, I’m going to increase your pay by half of that other guy’s salary.” I would just go from, “Hey, you get an extra $40,000.” So, now, the company’s paying the two remaining employees 200 grand a year instead of 160. The employees are thrilled because they got an extra 40K. And the company is not only saving the taxes — they’re still saving that $10,000 in payroll taxes — but now, they’re saving an additional $80,000 in salary, meaning their total savings for this maneuver is 100K. And that’s not even factoring in benefits like health insurance. So, what happens with having a cap on Social Security is it actually depresses the number of high-level workers in an economy. Go over and start looking online for jobs and note the cutoff at around 160K. That’s why. It has this depressing effect on high-level employment. Then so, scrapping the cap would actually level the playing field as well as fund Social Security for the foreseeable future. Are they going to scrap the cap? Probably not. But if you’re looking for a way to get Social Security to be completely solvent for the rest of our natural-born lives and to get it out of the news and make it not a football anymore, that is one quick and dirty way to do it.

[00:25:28] And now, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to address what is nails on a chalkboard to me is when people say Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. So, what is a Ponzi scheme? Well, okay. So, a Ponzi scheme is a type of fraud. A Ponzi scheme is typically where you get investors to give you money, promising them a return. Then you turn around and get new investors, who then give you more money and you use the new money that came in to pay the old investors a return. Now, if you are quick at math, you realize Ponzi schemes mathematically always will fail because at some point, you’re going to run out of people to give you new money. And people will say because Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program, it’s a Ponzi scheme ’cause it looks exactly the same. So, let’s look at the attributes of a Ponzi scheme. There are basically five things you can look at to determine whether something’s a Ponzi scheme. Number one: you pay early investors with new investors. Number two: you promise regular returns. That is, your returns don’t fluctuate. Number three: you claim that you have a secret sauce, some sort of undisclosed trick that you’re doing that’s part of a business enterprise and you can’t tell anybody because you’ve got this cool market position. Number four: it tends to be in unregulated areas. And number five: the person who’s putting on the Ponzi scheme creates a sense of FOMO or the fear of missing out. 

[00:26:49] So, let’s look at Social Security. Let’s look at number one. You pay early investors with new investors. Well, Social Security is in fact a pay-as-you-go, so that is to say that I, the new investor in this case, am paying the old investor, my grandma in this case, and so therefore, it looks like that — except I’m not an investor. I’m not investing in anything expecting a return. I’m just paying the bills that are part of the Social Security Administration. And if you don’t believe me that this isn’t part of the Ponzi scheme works, this is basically how all companies pay their salaries. Money comes in. They pay their employees. Money comes in. They pay their employees. That is literally how that works. So, the fact that you are paying as you go doesn’t actually mean that you are in fact paying early investors with new investors. But with Social Security, just because of its structure, I could give it that and say, “Okay. I’m willing to let that one slide. Tell me more.”

[00:27:45] Which brings us to number two: regular returns. So, a Ponzi scheme, like if you look at Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, he promised that he could get around 12% no matter what. So, even in the absolute worst market conditions, he generated 12%. That’s what’s known as a regular return. Does Social Security offer a regular return? No because, again, we didn’t actually invest in anything and Social Security bought treasury bonds. So, I guess you can kind of say there’s an investment going on here but treasury bonds, their rates fluctuate up and down and it’s really important to understand that in low-rate environments, the Social Security Administration actually suffers because the actual returns go up and down. So, Social Security is not offering a regular return. It offers a regular payout but that’s no different than any other pension fund. So, social Security doesn’t work on this one. 

[00:28:32] Alright. Let’s look at number three. There’s the secret sauce. This is where like people will sit there and wanna argue that the secret sauce is not a part of any Ponzi scheme. That’s not true. Charles Ponzi, the guy who the thing’s named after, he didn’t disclose what he was doing but he just told people “I found a trick” and people bought it because he was such a magnetic personality. Bernie Madoff was the same thing. How do you do it, Bernie? “Well, it’s part of my secret sauce” and that’s what he would tell people. So, is the Social Security Administration claiming to be in business somewhere with some secret trick? No. It’s all public information. This is in part why it’s such a political football. Everybody and their brother can go look up everything there is to know about Social Security from how big is the trust fund to what other payouts to what are the, you know, projections for the payroll tax and everything else.

[00:29:22] Number four: it tends to be in unregulated areas. Well, unlike cryptocurrency where there’s a lot of Ponzi schemes, this is about as regulated as you could possibly get. The Social Security Administration is entirely created, managed by laws in the public eye, so it doesn’t pass there either. And lastly, number five: does Social Security create a sense of FOMO? Like do I really need to explain that one? I sincerely hope that I don’t. 

[00:29:53] Social Security stuff — and I hope that I’ve exceeded your expectations on interest — but it’s about as interesting as watching paint dry. No one wakes up in the morning super, super excited about Social Security. And if they do, well, they’re keeping it mostly to themselves. Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. It doesn’t fit really any of the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme. Lots of other things do: MLMs, cryptocurrency, certain other people who are in shadow banking systems. But not Social Security. There’s lots to be said. And like I said, ladies and gentlemen, this is just a primer. It’s not a doctoral dissertation. But I hope you have a better understanding of what’s going on when people are talking about “We have to address entitlements otherwise, they’re gonna explode the debt.” I hope that you’ve walked away from this episode with some better understanding when the media sits there and tries to sell you outrage and fear. I hope, ladies and gentlemen, that this episode is bringing you one step closer to helping take control of your financial life and living free.

[00:30:51] Before I go, thank you so much for listening. If this show means anything to you, please leave me a rating or review. I’m really trying to grow the podcast. I’m trying to grow Fiscally Savage. We’ve got so much cool stuff coming up in this year and I want to get the message out to more people. I’d really appreciate if you would make that recommendation. And as always, if you got any questions, comments, concerns, or worries, find me on the Instagram @fiscallysavage and I’ll be happy to chat with you. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, I’ll see you on Tuesday. Go out there, take control of your financial lives, and live free.

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