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(A brief excerpt from How Social Security Picks Your Pocket, 2003 - Courtesy of Algora Publishing)

When it comes time to divvy up the benefits, there are some winners and many losers in the Social Security system, as illustrated by the following drawing: 

At the top of the drawing, you see the groups that surrender all or part of their benefits to the Social Security Wealth Transfer Machine.  Those groups are single people, the so-called “high earners,” people who don’t live for long after age 67, people who work more than 35 years, and couples where husband and wife each have significant earnings.  At the bottom of the drawing are a couple of groups that get extra benefits – in massive quantities.  Those are married people with stay-at-home spouses, and so-called “poor” people.  These transfersare accomplished by means of four mechanisms, built into the Social Security rules and regulations:

 

 

 

The four transfer mechanisms

·       a 3-rate benefit formulathat constitutes a crude de facto welfare device,

·         an obsolete shifting of benefits to people, solely on the basis of marital work sharing,

·         a forced delay of the retirement date, until many of us are in the grave, and

·         a failure to give workers credit for service beyond 35 years

The first two items, above, involve massive distributions of extra benefits, and are very costly to the Social Security system.  On the other hand, the last two items are very costly to many individuals within the system, but do not hurt the finances of the system as a whole.