The Ryan Group is anxious to do a hostile takeover of our public investment programs. They tell the public that these are “entitlement” programs, and that we are expecting the government to take care of us when we are no longer useful.
Paul Ryan and the Trump GOP is counting on us not knowing how valuable our past investments should be if they had been independently invested.
To know how much the GOP is proposing to steal, we should know how much a given investment in a given year would be worth today if it had been invested in a low cost S&P fund over the ensuing years.
To find out for myself, I pulled out my latest Social Security statement, and entered my earnings for every year since 1970. ( I can retire next year) Using the total employment tax for each year ( employer and employee medicare and social security contributions), the spreadsheet calculates the dollars contributed and then multiplies that times the total return on the S&P since that year, assuming a reinvestment of dividends. The result is the effective value of that contribution today.
I admit that going into this, I thought that my personal contributions would cover less than my expected benefits. Boy was I WRONG!
I didn’t want to share my exact financial history with the world, so I modified the numbers to reflect a person who might have taken a more traditional path through the work world, working in a reasonably well paid job and seeing regular increases in pay from 1970 until retirement at age 65 in 2016.
This imaginary but typical middle class person should have an account worth over $2 Million Dollars today.
At a 5% annual return on investment, this would return $108,000 per year or $9,000 per month! Without ever touching the principle!
We can’t let the GOP frame this as a reform, or that SS is broke or the country cannot afford it. We paid for it. A middle class wage earner paid FAR MORE than we will expect to receive. If the GOP wants our benefits, we need to demand fair compensation.
I’d be happy to trade my benefits for a check today for just $2 Million .
You can download my spreadsheet here:
phaven-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/…
I’d like to see this spreadsheet get a wide distribution. If any of you are so inclined, please download the spreadsheet, put in your own numbers as far as you know them, and see what your result is. If you do that, please publish your own total value as a comment.
Works best for people who, like me, are nearing retirement.
If anyone technically inclined would like to turn this idea into an online web page calculator, please get in touch. People need to see exactly how much they are being robbed of!