Supposedly there is no money to refund current workers. I suspect Social security will stay the same as it is now. They need to raise the cal to 250K though.

They will find a way. Meanwhile, so much of what so many of us have worked our whole lives for is under a very grave threat.

all die. They would take the money and say hey, we're paying down the national debt, (what's left after they take their personal share through shenanigans.)

It paid for bombs.

Now they want to give control of the money currently being withheld to some Wall Street crony so the can get rich quickly and take that money.

And let Wall St. "service" you.

The SSA cannot hold on to surplus tax revenues. It has to use it to buy special-issue Treasure notes, which help pay for any budget deficit. If there's insufficient deficit in a given year, they buy up old debt and rebrand it as those special-issue T-notes. The trust fund is special-issue government debt.

Notice that the debt in the trust fund is just tax money earmarked for one purpose and "loaned" internally to another branch of the government. With the ACA "penalties" that weren't taxes the SCOTUS decided to ignore Obama and the ACA supporters in order to save the ACA by renaming those penalties "taxes". That's the Congress' authority (every branch has Constitutionally specified authorities; the government is limited not just by restrictions but by only being allowed to do what we the people said it could do). Congress doesn't have the authority of set up its own insurance company and use the IRS as its storefront. The only reason the FICA tax is special is that Congress said it was special. It imposed the earmark; it can remove the earmark. It hasn't over the last 40 years, regardless of who's in office, and I don't see it happening this time 'round either. Of course, as the SSA moves to redeem a lot of that debt, things might change. That's a few years off, though, and it won't hurt for a few years after that (barring another large recession).


For the last decade or so, the surplus hasn't been overwhelming. During the recession, there wasn't a surplus. Now with baby-boomers retiring, the present surplus will probably tank and the trust fund will take a nose dive. That's fair; they paid a large amount of the money that's in the trust fund. It'll cover most of them until they're in their 70s and 80s.

The first table in the link is assets held; the second, receipts; the third, disbursements.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4a3.html