WASHINGTON — According to a recent CNN poll, 60 percent of Americans under 60 and 70 percent of those under 50 believe that Social Security will not be able to pay them a benefit when they retire.
In reality, the likelihood that any living American’s Social Security benefits will not be paid to them when they retire is about the same as the probability that there will be no U.S. government at that time.
Is anybody banking on that? Of course if you are going to take something away from people, the first step is to convince them that it wasn’t really there in the first place.
What makes the whole deception even more fascinating is that everyone is using the same assumptions about the future and the same numbers.
The common source for everyone writing and talking about Social Security is the annual Social Security Trustees Report. This shows that the program can pay all promised benefits for the next 27 years, without any changes at all. If nothing is done over the next 27 years, only about 75 percent of scheduled benefits would be payable in 2037; but that would still be more than what retirees receive today, after adjusting for inflation.