Hi, cherry, Getting back up to speed with this thread.
I agree that we did work for any benefits and could have gotten a better return if the money had been invested. But I didn't know how to invest and was overwhelmed with debt and finances as a young person. I would never have invested the money I regarded as "stolen" out of my paycheck!
When I started working at 16, I would _never_ have put anything into savings of the tiny amounts I was paid. I think I started retirement savings on my own at around age 40, and they weren't huge.
As a woman living alone there have been times when if _I_ could have "raided" my social security, I would have had to. I couldn't raid social security, though, so I devised other solutions.
So I am grateful that Uncle Sam planted necessity in front of me or I would not have enough to live on in retirement.
For quite a while I have also been contributing to an IRA, but to have the steady record of employment rewarded (I have always worked a job or two) means I am a step up despite student loans, hurricanes, financial crises, homeowner crises, and most recently the Great Recession and a lightning strike to my a/c unit.
Social Security insurance is not enough to live on any more, I do agree. But it required me to think about the future even when I was struggling to pay off my student loans, which took 10 years. Medical bills from my twenties that were larger than the student loans. Goodness, when I got my first car, I could not believe how much it took to keep a car going.
Social Security will not cover all increases in COL over the years. They instead, at least for me, insured I would have something even if everything else went totally haywire. Everything else, including the Stock Market does seem to go haywire regularly, so this government program is insurance I appreciate. Much more than when I was younger.
It truly is insurance--and it is not an annuity or a promise backed by a company that could go bankrupt in 2 months. That "security" is what is valuable, not the return on contributions. I am glad I was forced to pay into the system and that it was inexorably deducted from my pay, though as a perpetual student, I bought my first real winter coat (and I lived in NYC) six years after I had been living and working on my own. The first thing I would have raided Social Security for would have been a winter coat. I made do with my mother's WW II nurse's cape.
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