Of course not. They're part of the constitution.

So do you have the right to riot, or is it mandatory?

If you invested 10% of a meager $30,000 salary for 50 years and got average return rates, you'd end up with 1.2 MILLION dollars of personal savings. That would last you 40 years at your $30,000 salary.

And that still leaves 2% to 3% (since SS is more than 10%) that could be left for social programs for those who (really) cannot work.

Math check :

(30,000 * 1/10) * 50 * ~1.1 = 165,000

That's approximately 5 1/2 years of living once you retire, assuming you keep spending money at the same rate. And for the people who can't afford to save any money - the people who barely get by paying their bills? WTF do they do when they turn 65? Social security is a good idea, and at least gives a small safety net to those with nothing.

The real problem is when Government borrows money from programs like social security and medicare, because they never pay it back. The government owes itself about 4.7 trillion dollars, borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.

Well, I may have underestimated the effects of compound interest, but you're being rather generous with your figures.

Where do you think you're going to get a 6.7% return on your investment? Only lucky stock brokers make that much. More likely you get at most 4%, and most people who earn 30,000 a year have to go through at least 2 or 3 years of school. 65 - 21 = 44 years of saving.

So, $3,000 at 4% for 44 years :
$360,088.18

And at 30,000 a year that's still only 12 years. Hope you don't want to live past 77, or else you can go live in the street. And none of that accounts for the people who can't afford to save any money to begin with. Might as well send them off to the glue factory when they hit 65, because they won't have anything to live on.

The masses have found out they can vote themselves bread and circuses. It'll take another few decades before they have any sense again.

*L0Ling at usa

My figures are pessimistic:

• Investments are shown to give 8% annually over the long run (i.e. 50 years) when you consider interest and reinvested dividends. (It's certainly been true for mine over the last 10 years.) I figured less than that.

  
  

• Most people will average more than $30,000 / year over their lifetime. Even if your wage starts there, you're likely to get a minimum of 2% increase every year.

  
  

• When you reach retirement age, you wouldn't stop making money off interest.

If you want to base it off of 40 solid years of working (25-65) with a intro salary of $30,000 and give yourself a 2% raise every year, you would have about $1 million in savings. If you moved the money into a safer, lower yield interest rate of around 4% at retirement, you could spend almost $40,000 / year and not lose any money!

You could live to infinity.

You miss the point entirely! The government already takes around 12% of your income for Social Security and related programs. (Note that your employer pays around 6% of that, but in reality, it's just coming out of your paycheck too.)

If the government didn't take out that 12%, you would be free to invest it yourself.

I understand that principle, and I think it is a smart one because you are right. The poor or stupid person would use Edgar's silly logic and not save the extra 12% they now have. But let me opt out of the "personal savings" aspect of SS, because I'm smart enough to save more money than the government will ever be able to give me via SS.

It's never stated explicitly that it's mandatory, but every good Canadian knows it's riot or GTFO.

This is the government ... of course they cannot use the money better than a smart person.

How can you invest money when you are immediately paying out more in benefits than you are collecting because this generation of workers is smaller than the number of retired people, and when the previous generation was larger you didn't save any of it? (This hasn't quite happened yet, but in a few years it will be losing money.)

That's just a non-argument. "The government is by default made of fail". Of COURSE it could, in theory, be better than a smart person at investing. They could hire good investors, for one. This assumes that investors are actually better than chance at investing (I was some report claiming otherwise recently).

But my questions were not rhetorical - I'm curious as to if there are benefits of scale when it comes to investments. I guess that's why there are collective investment schemes.

Of course, if the current pool of workers is smaller than the previous one, either the current one will have to pay more or it would have to be solved in some other way.

Wow, Dustin... I wish the Daily Show did a segment on you.

Solid arguments, both of you.

In theory, an individual with a direct personal interest will do better than a politician seeking to win re-election. Show me a government that actually exists to serve its people for the "greater good," and then, in theory, I may agree with you.

But why does the government need to be in charge of investing money? Why not just mandate that 10% of the first $100,000 your pre-tax income must be placed into a personal retirement fund? You can then take 3% more for disability insurance.

With the current situation, you must a) cut benefits or b) raise taxes.

And since the typical politician only cares about getting re-elected (because it is his career), doing either of those two things are bad.

I'm not against an optional government personal savings plan for those who cannot be bothered to invest in private options. It's your loss, not mine.