Just for fun, I calculated the net present value of my Social Security benefit, based on the (admittedly heroic) assumption that I'll earn $40,000 every year until I'm 62. According to this chart, the life expectancy of a male born in 1976 is 69.1, but that average includes some folks who are already gone, so I plugged some information (weight, non-smoker status, driving habits) into this page and apparently I'm going to live to be 82. I calculated my Social Security benefit amount in today's dollars with this benefit calculator from SSA, and I used a discount rate of 4.3% per year based on the the average of all the figures listed here (if you look closely you'll notice the rates aren't evenly spaced, but plugging the dates in was more work than I wanted).
The results? Under the assumptions above, in today's dollars I would pay in 12.4% of $40,000 for the next 35 years, a total of $173,600. I would receive benefits of $1007 per month for 20 years, a total of $241,680. But when the inputs are discounted (ie future values are weighted less than current values, because in the present we have the option to earn money by investing), the taxes I'd be paying have a net present value of $92,498, and the benefits only $38,029. This means I should be willing to pay up to $54,469 today to get out of Social Security and into some private investment plan instead (since $-54,469 is the net present value of the tax and benefits under Social Security.
Of course, that's not the whole story, because Social Security provides some things I haven't included in the calculation. One is the security of knowing that I'll get my benefit regardless of how long I live -- so, if I should be lucky enough to live longer than 82 years, I'll still have a Social Security check coming every month. If I'm risk averse, I might therefore value Social Security more than the alternative. Also, Social Security provides millions of people with a disability benefit, and it's hard to figure the value of that into my calculation. And this analysis won't even consider the externalities imposed on "the rest of us" by the impoverished elderly (in terms of welfare payouts or degraded moral values) since the individual has no incentive to consider these problems in making a decision.
I didn't play with the income levels, but people making more than $40,000 per year should have a net present value lower than $-54,469, people making less, higher. For people born on in 1961 and earning $40,000 throughout their careers, the net present value of their Social Security benefit should be around $0; those born earlier would want to keep their benefits.
Note also that the $5000 transition tax mentioned by Paul at Right Side of the Rainbow (more about this here) is almost exactly the amount of FICA tax paid in one year by someone who makes $40,000, which also happens to be right around the average income per year for an American. So, if all the workers in the whole country opted out at the same time, all the transition tax revenue would be about the same as the FICA tax revenue for one year. After that year, the government would still have to pay current Social Security beneficiaries' checks, but there wouldn't be anymore FICA tax revenue since everyone would have opted out! So there's an obvious financial problem there. If everyone paid $54,469 in transition taxes (and they wouldn't, since only people younger and richer than me would value opting out that highly), that would equal about 11 years of FICA tax revenues, still not even close to enough to cover current beneficiaries.
The fundamental stuctural problem with this idea is that it takes the people who will generate the most FICA revenue -- the young and the rich -- and removes them from the eqaation right at the moment that revenue is most needed. The Bush plan of letting people opt out of Social Security simply cannot be paid for without cutting current benefits or raising taxes.
I thought workers paid in approximately 7.5% and your employer pays the rest. Where does the 12% figure come from?
Workers pay in 6.2% and employers match with another 6.2%. There's also 1.45% paid for Medicare by both the worker and the employer, whcih makes a total of 7.65% to each.
But the fact that the employer pays half is kind of a trick... persumably at least some of that money would be paid as wages if Social Security didn't exist, and probably almost all. So when you're calculating foregone wages, you have to inlcude both the worker and employer portions of the tax.
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