…social security and medicare is on the social safety net, but a lot of them are too blind to even consider that they’re on a version of “welfare”.
Technically, SS and Medicare aren’t “welfare” as SS and one part of Medicare are paid by a specific tax, assessed on the people who eventually receive benefits from the programs. SS is no more “welfare” than an annuity you buy from an insurance company. The only problem with SS is the “JCs” can’t skim the cash flow, hence the drumbeat for privatization, so they can skim it.
Some years ago, I saw a guy on FB post “build the wall, repeal Medicare”. His friends immediately jumped on him “we PAID for Medicare”.
As David Stockman commented some years ago, their ideology was defeated by democracy. You can’t roger a large majority of the people for the benefit of a few who already have the most, as long as the majority has a voice.
…then the majority of Americans would invest that on their own and
they’d all be millionaires.
I read a SS privatization proposal that was floated in the early 2000s, while the POTUS was waving a binder, kept in a file cabinet, and saying words to the effect 'there’s your trust fund, worthless IOUs kept in a file cabinet". The contents of those binders were receipts for United States Treasury bonds, backed by the “full faith and credit of the United States”, and far from worthless.
The proposal was for all the SS tax revenue to be diverted to an approved list of Wall St firms, who would invest the money according to a specified schedule. On retirement, the money was required to be rolled over to an annuity from a Wall St firm. So, in spite of the talking points, the retirement money was never “your money”, because you never had any control over it, before, or after, retirement. The major difference was that Wall St could skim the money every year from the day you start working to the day you die.
As SS is a pay-as-you-go system, current benefits paid from current tax revenue, the effect of diverting all the tax revenue to Wall St was that the government would have to borrow to cover existing benefit payments to people already on SS. So the government debt and debt service costs soar, while Wall St makes money off it. Sort of the way Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D, which were passed during the same era work: increased cost to the government for the benefit of private insurance companies.
Steve