The Problem With Social Security

If we don't do something, this program will utterly fail. As people live longer and retire at roughly the same period in their lives, we have to pay out more. And there are fewer people year over year paying in and sufficient amount to make that happen. We're stuck here. If you keep pushing it out, you don't solve the problem. You just push the problem into the future.

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There's no way to sugar-coat it. Social Security is going to fail. There are, of course, ways to possibly extend its life for a few years, or even decades, but ultimately, like all Ponzi schemes, it will collapse. By the federal government's and the Social Security Board of Trustees' own admissions, the Social Security program will be paying out more than it takes in in just 4 years. At current rates (and assuming the federal government fully pays back the more than $5 trillion it "borrowed" from Social Security's accounts), the program will be completely out of money in about 17 years. What does this situation mean for current working Americans? Is there any way to solve this problem? Join Antony Davies and James Harrigan as they discuss this and more on this week's episode of Words and Numbers.

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