My disagreement revolves entirely around the word fraudulent. I follow the legal definition of fraud:
In the United States, common law recognizes nine elements constituting fraud:
1. a representation of an existing fact;
2. its materiality;
3. its falsity;
4. the speaker's knowledge of its falsity;
5. the speaker's intent that it shall be acted upon by the plaintiff;
6. the plaintiff's ignorance of its falsity;
7. the plaintiff's reliance on the truth of the representation;
8. the plaintiff's right to rely upon it; and
9. consequent damages suffered by the plaintiff.
Fraud requires all nine of those be established, more than one could be debated especially outside of intent to convict in court, but #4 is a safe bet, because unless someone wants to name a specific individual it is pretty obvious most liberals believe SS is not an innately flawed construct.
So, again, I do not consider it a Ponzi Scheme because I do not believe it was fraudulent, my disagreement with the others is essentially the difference between two people debating if an astrologer is a fraud or not, one saying she is and the other saying she believes in it thus not a fraud, but both agreeing there is little to no reason to believe in her forecasts.
I do not know how this keeps confusing you, and I am more than passing angry at what seems like a deliberate misreading of my comments. Especially when they are so clear and this disagreement with others of the type you suggest does not seem to exist in their eyes either.
Try Merriam-Websters definition (below linked:) ": an investment swindle in which some early investors are paid off with money put up by later ones in order to encourage more and bigger risks." Social Security is not a swindle, but was also never predicated on its benefits encouraging more and bigger risks. Also, a characteristic Ponzi feature is requiring ever and impossibly more future investors to pay current ones in a short enough period to satisfy promises of not only large but FAST returns, usually within months or even weeks. Because SS does not promise returns within weeks or months, but after decades, and the US population will continue growing for the foreseeable future, the very factors that doom Ponzis to insolvency make Social Security inherently sustainable.
As noted in another response, simply removing the witholding limit, with no other change to benefits or payments, would allow SS to pay each current beneficiary $11,000/year with half a million dollars left over. That is just over $900/year, but even if the contributor/beneficiary ratio dropped from the current 2.73 to the supposed 2.0 SS could still maintain current average benefits indefinitely simply by removing the witholding limit. We can debate whether that is fair to contributors and/or beneficiaries, but NOT whether it is TRUE; that is cold hard mathematical fact, regardless of why one chooses to disbelieve the forecast.
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