Mature Life Features

. . . to the middle of the week.

Those of you with scooters can prep then for

service a 2 p.m. Thursday in the lobby

before scooting over to

Thirsty Thursday at 3 p.m. in the bistro.

= = = = =

Social Security Future Dimming

There’s been some pressure to let workers invest their own to-be-used-for-retirement funds. Supporters of this movement point out that, with the track record of the stock market over the last several decades, their return would be much more than what they receive from their payroll contributions to Social Security during their working years.

That sounds grand on the surface, but there is no assurance that everybody will set aside money from their paychecks to build a retirement fund. Nor is there any guarantee that they will invest their money wisely. And overlooked in this scenario is the fact that Social Security taxes extracted today is used to pay benefits to today’s recipients, not to build a fund for the current payees’ retirement.

Revamping the system to build a fund for current Social Security taxpayers would require a double tax system, with a portion of the Social Security tax supporting current retirees and a portion going into a trust fund.

While presidential commissions have toyed and tinkered with ideas on how to repair this economic hole, it only gets bigger. The current worker-to-retiree ratio is less than three to one. That is expected to slide to slightly more than two workers for every retiree by 2030. That means every two workers will be supporting one retiree on Social Security.

No one has even addressed this problem: what happens to Social Security support when robots, who don’t get paid a salary out of which to extract Social Security taxes, become a major portion of the workforce?