 Barney writes, I keep hearing y'all call social security an entitlement. But seems as though the definition of entitlement would be receiving something that you have done nothing to deserve. Nick and I, he's writing this, are the last of the baby boomers born in 1964 and I have resented the theft from my paycheck for 45 years. I agree that we as a nation have been screwed by the Ponzi scheme of social security, but I also feel I deserve the money I paid in. I also know that my money was used to support those before me, but in a business perspective, I have the right to the money I paid in. Write me a check. I'll forgive what I could have received in interest by anyone with half a brain, your thoughts, please, I will just cut in quickly. I hear this whenever I use the word entitlement, people get mad and I always just use it as the, you are entitled to it legally. Although Nick might have a rejoinder to even that description. Nick, what say you as, besides just the Generation Jones erasure happening in this? I feel his pain tremendously, but the fact of the matter is, you're not entitled legally to your social security. There was a 1960 case Fleming v. Nester, which involved a Bulgarian immigrant who was deported after it became clear that he had belonged to the Communist Party and had lied on his entry into the country, but he sued after he was deported to get his social security. And the court said, nobody has an expectation. It's not a property, right? Like you don't own it. Is it realistic that the government will like massive, you know, on a mass level, not pay out social security when they don't have to anymore or they don't want to? That's unlikely, but it's important. We don't have a right to it. And that should add to the anger over the ridiculousness of social security. And the fact that it does not make enough money to cover its payouts and it needs to stop. And I would say to Barney, again, I feel the pain. I would be happy if this would provoke a political solution. I'm willing to walk away from it, you know, and just like be like, okay, just stop taxing me for it. And I don't get anything. That's the trade that I'm willing to take because otherwise I don't think there's a way to do that. The current benefit in 2024, the average payout, which is distinct from the median obviously, but it's about $1,900. I would much rather see if we are going to have mass transfer programs, have that money go to people who are poor and who need temporary assistance or temporary help or even long-term help and get rid of old age entitlements period. They were passed, you know, first with social security and the depression when being old meant you were likely to die and you didn't have retirement. And then with Medicare, which was called the last act of the New Deal by LBJ and its other big proponents, times have changed and well, old people are wealthy people and they should be funding their lifestyles accordingly. And it's gonna be ugly, but we need to have an actual shift point where we say, okay, this system, whatever, however it might have functioned in the past that no longer is relevant to what we are now and we need to change how we do this. Catherine, are you gonna be marching on the national mall with a get your statist hands off my social security sign? Absolutely, I've already got it. I've already got some poster board and some Crayola markers, I'm ready to go. Crayola, by the way, 80% of the non-toxic Crayola. Helena Kahn, she's gonna come for my box of 64 colors. That's the one with a little sharpener in the back, which is, you know, that's the kind of special perk that only Crayola users get, which is, if you think about it, basically a crime. Okay, so yeah, I mean, in the Republican budget plan, the initial Republican budget plan, there was this idea, maybe they were going to just try again to raise the age of social security eligibility by a couple of years. Everybody panic, like it was, you know, this is, I don't think that our letter writer has to worry because the spectacular unseriousness of the US Congress in dealing with this question, payouts will be continuing to people next age, should pick up people that are letter writers age. Unfortunately, you know, the question, the question I think is still a little bit more of a live one for younger folks. And of course, I would love to see a system where we could opt out of, as Nick says, opt out of paying in, maintain our own retirement accounts, whatever it is, and there are so many better options. But, you know, the fact is, I pay taxes and everyone pays taxes for lots of things that we are entitled to in the conventional sense that we don't receive, like a good public education. Many, many people pay, dutifully pay their taxes and don't have a functional school that they can feel comfortable sending their kids to. I don't know, like roads, you know, more roads. They exist, they're full of potholes that might, for example, take you out and break your knee. This is, you know, these are basic expectations. These are entitlements, again, in the conventional sense that we are supposed to have because we are taxpayers. We're not gonna get them. It doesn't matter whether you feel you deserve them. The government is bad at providing these services and they are going to be particularly bad, I think. At paying off, you know, anything that looks remotely like the promises that were made about social security to younger people, but honestly, the letter writer is probably fine. So, I guess congratulations to him, she said bitterly. Peter, I was kind of surprised to read the news from, I think, last week that the Republican Study Committee, one of those things in the Uncapital Hill did, in fact, come out and say, yeah, we should maybe extend a year or two the time people start getting their social security monies. What, I'm surprised just because the modern GOP, led by Donald Trump, has made running against any kind of tweaking to entitlements central to their worldview. What did that tell us, if anything, about where Republicans are in seriousness about even acknowledging the cruel, cruel math that used to be just a bipartisan, no-brainer was a problem that needs to be fixed in the future? Well, do recall that the Republican Study Committee is one of the more conservative organizations, collections of Republicans on Capitol Hill, and so what they say isn't necessarily what the entire party believes. I think the thing that I would wanna stress to the letter writer here is that if you got all the money that you paid into social security, if they just wrote you a check that is equal to the dollar value, that would be far less than the expected value of your social security entitlement payout, almost certainly, because that is true for the vast, vast majority of beneficiaries. And so you see these polls, I think reason it may even have done some at some point where you ask people, well, would you be okay with social security if you just got the money that you'd paid in back? And people say, yeah, but then you tell them that's going to be a lot less than the social security that you would have gotten under the current system. They're like, oh, wait, I'm not sure I support that, but that gap, the fact that the amount that you paid in doesn't equal the amount that social security owes you under its payment scheme, that is the problem, is that there's not enough money in the system to pay for social security's obligations and social security and healthcare costs and in part because of the changing demographics with more people living longer and after retirement, those are the biggest drivers of the long-term debt. And so if you wanna take a pulse of the Republican party and where it's at on this stuff, I would actually point you to what speaker of the house Mike Johnson said on CNBC last week, where he said, he would support a fiscal commission to take a look at doing something about the debt. Just so long as that commission took off the table at the beginning, raising taxes or doing anything to entitlements. I too support losing weight without, in any way changing my diet or my exercise, that sounds great, but that's basically what he's proposing. The fact of the matter is social security benefits, they both keep going up and then they keep getting kind of dinged because you actually end up paying tax on a lot of social security income or more than you used to. Over the past three years in 2022, the COLA, the Cost of Living Adjustment for Social Security was 8.7%. It was 5.9% last year and this year it's going to be a mere 3.2%. So it goes up, but then you get taxed on it and then it causes a bigger imbalance that Peter was talking about. And the real kicker is every couple of years, the amount of income that is subject to social security taxes goes up. It's currently around 160 grand, which is a lot of money. And it used to top out like $100,000, $110,000. So and the retirement age goes up by a month or two for each year that you retire up to 69. So we're gonna get squeezed and the question is, do we want to try and keep maintaining a really leaking boat and a rickety ship or whatever metaphor you wanna use that is really falling apart and is not doing its primary function anyway, which is providing for a retirement for old people or do we want to admit that, okay, we've learned from this experiment and it's a tear down and we need to build a different system to help people who need it, going forward into the 21st century. Between this and the Titanic reference, I think what Nick is telling us is that he is ready to go on his retirement cruise. Like he's out of here. As long as it's not a reason cruise, okay? RIP the reason cruises, I never got to go on one. That was a clip from the latest Reason Roundtable. If you wanna see more clips, go here. If you want to see the whole episode, go here. Make sure to subscribe at Reason's YouTube channel or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening, watching or both.