Social Security Earned A Pitiful 2.8% On Your Money Last Year
by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
ZeroHedge.com
Tue, 04/23/2019
Hot off the presses: The Board of Trustees for the Social Security and Medicare programs in the United States just released their annual report a few hours ago.
And if you want to read all of its gory detail, check it out for yourself here.
Both of these programs are massively and terminally underfunded. And not by a little bit.
The Board of Trustees itself calculates Social Security’s long-term shortfall at a mind boggling $43+ TRILLION.
Simply put, the trust funds don’t have enough money to keep the programs going, at least under the current promises.
They admit right at the beginning of their report that, starting 2020, Social Security’s cost will exceed the money it earns in from interest and taxes.
That’s not some far out date decades into the future. That’s next year. And every year after that.
By 2034, just 15 years from now, Social Security’s primary trust fund will be fully depleted. And one of Medicare’s trust funds will run out of money in 2026.
In case you’re wondering, by the way, the Board of Trustees consists of the United States Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Labor, Secretary of Health and Human Services, etc.
This isn’t a bunch of conspiracy theorists. They’re some of the top executives in government.
So I’m not exaggerating in the slightest when I say this is a complete disaster. Millions of people depend on Social Security for their livelihood… people who have been promised for their entire working lives that the program would be solvent.
When the funds run out of money, countless people’s lives will be turned upside down.
You’d think this would be considered some kind of national emergency… that politicians would be doing everything they can to fix this.
But hardly a word is uttered about it. 15 years is far enough out that most of these people don’t expect to be in office anymore… so it will be someone else’s problem to deal with.
Not to mention, their options are extremely limited.
On one hand, they could try to actually generate more investment income for the program. To me this is an obvious choice.
Right now the Social Security trust funds have $2.9 trillion in assets. Yet they only earned a pitiful $83 billion in investment income last year, a return of roughly 2.8%.
The Rest…HERE
