General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Fellow childfree folks, how much did you love writing the check out to the IRS after hearing all the [View all]hfojvt
(37,573 posts)because I paid the taxes that entitle me to that benefit. End of story. Full stop. The children of others will be paying their own taxes to give THEMSELVES a benefit when they retire. I don't owe them sh*t because I paid my own way. And where I sit, it looks highly likely that I will have paid in far more than I get out. So a pie in the sky does not seem like much of an argument for being robbed today.
As for risk free investments. Clearly even social security is not risk free, as politicians on the right are determined to plunder it even further, so they can cut taxes for rich people.
But I am so old, I remember when bank CDs paid far more than 4%. When I first started my IRA I was getting something like 7% on CDs. Well, I ran a spreadsheet to predict the future value, and decided to use 5% just to be conservative and safe. At the time, it seems like a good bet that CD interest would never fall below 5%. Probably you could go back 30 years and it would always have been over 5%.
Too bad we only got 12 years into the future before rich people blew up the economy.