{"id":123489,"date":"2022-07-09T11:09:46","date_gmt":"2022-07-09T15:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=123489"},"modified":"2022-07-11T06:13:19","modified_gmt":"2022-07-11T10:13:19","slug":"really-social-security-check-is-now-called-federal-benefit-payment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=123489","title":{"rendered":"<h3><b>Really? Social Security Check is now called Federal Benefit Payment<\/b><\/h3>"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><!--more--><strong>Social Security Check vs. Federal Benefit Payment<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Submitted by Anonymous<\/p>\n<p>The Social Security check is now (or soon will be) referred to as a &#8220;Federal Benefit Payment?&#8221; I&#8217;ll be part of the one percent to forward this. I am forwarding it because it touches a nerve in me, and I hope it will in you. Please keep passing it on until everyone in our country has read it.<\/p>\n<p>The government is now referring to our Social Security checks as a &#8220;Federal Benefit Payment.&#8221; This isn&#8217;t a benefit. It is our money paid out of our earned income! Not only did we all contribute to Social Security but our employers did too. It totaled 15% of our income before taxes.<\/p>\n<p>If you averaged $30K per year over your working life, that&#8217;s close to $180,000 invested in Social Security.<\/p>\n<p>If you calculate the future value of your monthly investment in social security ($375\/month, including both you and your employers contributions) at a meager 1% interest rate compounded monthly, after 40 years of working you&#8217;d have more than $1.3+ million dollars saved!<\/p>\n<p>This is your personal investment. Upon retirement, if you took out only 3% per year, you&#8217;d receive $39,318 per year, or $3,277 per month.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s almost three times more than today&#8217;s average Social Security benefit of $1,230 per month, according to the Social Security Administration. (Google it \u2013 it\u2019s a fact).<\/p>\n<p>And your retirement fund would last more than 33 years (until you&#8217;re 98 if you retire at age 65)! I can only imagine how much better most average-income people could live in retirement if our government had just invested our money in low-risk interest-earning accounts.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, the folks in Washington pulled off a bigger &#8220;Ponzi scheme&#8221; than Bernie Madoff ever did. They took our money and used it elsewhere. They forgot (oh yes, they knew) that it was OUR money they were taking. They didn&#8217;t have a referendum to ask us if we wanted to lend the money to them. And they didn&#8217;t pay interest on the debt they assumed. And recently they&#8217;ve told us that the money won&#8217;t support us for very much longer.<\/p>\n<p>But is it our fault they misused our investments? And now, to add insult to injury, they&#8217;re calling it a &#8220;benefit&#8221;, as if we never worked to earn every penny of it.<\/p>\n<p>Just because they borrowed the money doesn&#8217;t mean that our investments were a charity!<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s take a stand. We have earned our right to Social Security and Medicare. Demand that our legislators bring some sense into our government.<\/p>\n<p>Find a way to keep Social Security and Medicare going for the sake of that 92% of our population who need it.<\/p>\n<p>Then call it what it is: Our Earned Retirement Income.<\/p>\n<p>99% of people won&#8217;t forward this. Will you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=123489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=123489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=123489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=123489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}