Originally Posted by
mwilbert
The people who are vested in the Detroit pension plans will probably get most of their promised money. The reason they are at risk for any of it is that Detroit doesn't have the excess taxing capacity to make them whole, so whatever undercontribution or underperformance have occurred can't be compensated for.
The Social Security retirement system is rather different. The Social Security retirement trust fund is not a pension fund in that sense and it is not intended to be able to pay out enough money to fund all of Social Security retirement payments. Ultimately, Social Security is funded by the taxing capacity of the United States, which is more than adequate for that.
The reason that people talk about future Social Security benefits being at risk is that under present law, after the retirement trust fund [[which does exist) is exhausted around 2033, there will only be enough revenue from currently-legislated Social Security taxes to pay about 75 percent of benefits, however that could be sustained more-or-less indefinitely [[the trustees project out 75 years, to 2087). However, Social Security is a wildly popular program and it will not require large changes in taxation and/or benefits to fix the revenue imbalance, so yes, I fully expect Social Security to be available to me, and my daughter too.
If it isn't available, it will be because the overall economy has collapsed, or we no longer have even a semblance of a democratic political system, and while either of those is possible, it isn't how I would bet. We would also have more to worry about than Social Security.