Numbskullery from Professor Barry Schwartz, meathead

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Choose and Lose: "This brings me to the final defense of privatization: the payroll taxes you pay are your money, and you ought to be able to do what you like with your money. This, I suspect, is the real justification behind the move to privatize, and it is the worst reason of all. The payroll tax is not 'your' money; it's our money. Social Security was created as an insurance scheme, not a pension scheme. It was meant to provide a safety net, to protect the unlucky from immiseration in old age. The benefits we get are not payouts from accounts in which we have accumulated our own private stash. What we get is largely determined by what we earned, but we keep getting it even after we've taken out every penny we put in. And if we happen to die early, someone else reaps the benefits of our contributions. "

Well, no. Social Security has never been an insurance scheme. If you want to call it such, you need to come up with another phrase to describe real insurance schemes. SS, hell all intergenerational transfers are Ponzi Schemes; further, the day of reckoning approacheth in less than half a century.