Nearly 1 in 4 Americans Think They Have a Personal Social Security Account

- Most Americans don't know how social security is funded but

- An overwhelming majority of nonretired adults (79%) do not believe they will receive their full scheduled Social Security benefits when they retire.

- About three in four adults (77%) have heard that Social Security is projected to run short of money by 2033.

If you thought you had an individual account, and you also thought the program overall was going to run out of money and that you weren't going to get the "full benefit", does that mean you thought you weren't paying enough in?

Where they've essentially implemented the system as the 1 in 4 American think it works in the USA. Specifically:

> It will become clearer how your pension or your employee’s pension grows. Employees will have their own pension account, showing all the contributions they have paid. And the profit or loss made with this money.

It will be interesting to see if this works out as they've calculated/predicted.

CATO is being pendantic.

Since Soc Sec is income insurance, I am opposed to the flat benefit concept. Higher incomes pay higher premiums so they should get higher payouts. We already have some benefit flattening now because Soc Sec benefits are partially taxable above $25K single/$32k married.

For example, if I was asked the second question, I honestly don't know which way I would have responded before being told the answer, because clearly the answer is in between the two options. Obviously it is not intended to "largely replace" your income, but also obviously it is not intended to only keep you above the poverty line, since it is based on your income during your life. So yes, it very concretely "replaces" your income, but only partially, not "largely". If it was only intended to keep you above the poverty line, it would be based on the poverty line.

Reading survey questions drives me insane.

What I found is that if they took my contributions and my employer's contributions on my behalf each month and put them into one year T-bills, with maturing bills rolled over into new one year T-bills, if I retired now (a couple years before my full retirement age) there would be enough to pay out something like 90-95% of my monthly benefit for the rest of my expected lifetime.

I didn't try to find the actual amounts of contributions for each month. I just took that total for the year and assumed it was spread equally across all 12 months. For T-bill rates I used the rate from the last day of the month.

I did a similar calculation for Medicare. With the same kind of setup my Medicare account would have had enough when I turned 65 to pay the unsubsidized monthly premium for a good marketplace plan on my state's ACA marketplace for the rest of my expected lifetime.

This suggests that a system that works like they say 1 in 4 thinks it works could be viable. Make it so if someone dies before their account runs out the remainder is used to pay people who have lived longer than their expected lifetimes.

The confounders and the structure of these polls are not statistically significant or valid ways of understanding anything except perhaps the poll taking institutions, and the polls they choose to perform and publish can provide insight into underlying agendas. The bubbles which they influence most are part of that context, so the social narrative of those bubbles represents a significant bias, regardless of the rules which may or may not be followed for any given poll.

The sampling of 2200 people, the use of the "it's math! ta-da! Statistics." is handwavy and manipulative at best. The error bars are so large as to make the results effectively meaningless. People should stop believing polls and pollsters unless or until they engage in scientifically legitimate methodology. Blinds, multiple question distributions, psychological profiling, corrections for environmental, cultural, and personal bias, multiple significant population sizes, effective sampling in choice of participants, and so on, and those sorts of polls require money and time that make doing legitimate polls prohibitively expensive and lengthy.

Most institutions engaging in polling don't want to bother with because they know they can handwave away concerns by claiming "Statistically valid random sample size!" and not have to address any of the other methodological or structural flaws.

This is no better (or worse) than a poll on bsky or twitter or hackernews, effectively. They just hide the fact that they're sampling from a segregated population and pretend it's representative.

And as far as the economic doom of social security hanging over our heads, it requires a balanced budget and fiscal responsibility, and the chuckleheads who've been running congress the last 60 years got what they wanted. Austerity or collapse or a whole menu of unpleasant shit sandwiches await for those of us who have to deal with the boomers' irresponsible and reckless orgy of self enrichment.

Honestly I'm pretty impressed that ~50% of people understand that social security payments today are funding current retirees, and not future retirees. The fact that only 25% think the opposite, and 25% don't know, is actually pretty impressive IMO.