In those international rankings of how well students do in various subjects, American students often do poorly, especially in science and math. Their math scores are frequently near the bottom. But I am not sure that is fair. I think our kids are pretty smart at math.
I was talking to our daughter recently, and she told me that people her age (i.e., under 30) don’t expect to ever collect anything from Social Security. They look at things like these:
- More and more boomers are retiring and the number of workers isn’t growing that much.
- Social Security is paying out more in benefits than it is collecting in taxes.
- The date that the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money keeps getting sooner and sooner. It’s now in the early 2030s. A few years ago it was in the late 2030s.
- But it doesn’t really matter when the Social Security Trust Fund is going to run out of money because the Social Security Trust Fund doesn’t really exist. When we were collecting more Social Security taxes than we were paying out in benefits, Social Security just gave the extra money to the federal government and got back IOUs. Now Social Security has to collect on those IOUs in order to pay benefits. And as the gap between Social Security payments being made and Social Security taxes being collected gets bigger, Social Security will need to get more and more money from the federal government – at a time when the federal government has a huge deficit.
- The Democratic leadership in Congress says we don’t need to worry about Social Security because the [pretend] Social Security Trust Fund won’t run out of IOUs (except they say “money”) until the 2030s. We can worry about it later, they say; i.e., after they’re out of office.
Our daughter and her friends look at these facts, and they add up the numbers. And they have decided Social Security won’t be there when it is time for them to collect. Sounds to me that they understand math pretty well.
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