Your Child's Inheritance: Debt

Most Americans know that our nation's Social Security system is headed for bankruptcy, but many do not understand why. The answer is simple. Americans are living longer yet we’re having fewer children. This means there will simply not be enough workers to support the unprecedented upcoming wave of new retirees.

Instead of preparing for this long-predicted crisis, the United States Congress has for the last twenty years spent the Social Security surplus on other government programs and replaced the nation's retirement funds with a stack of IOUs.

As a result of this failing system and Congress's constant borrowing, today's generation of young Americans is inheriting the single greatest financial debt the world has ever known.

Not Enough for America's Children

Social Security was introduced in the United States during the Great Depression when millions of hard-working citizens faced certain poverty in their senior years.

Yet, from the beginning, this well-meaning attempt to provide a safety net for seniors contained a fatal flaw that guaranteed the plan's ultimate collapse. The system was designed as a "pay-as-you-go" system, meaning that your pay-roll taxes go immediately out the door to pay benefits for today's retirees. This worked fine when we had lots of workers supporting relatively few retirees. But by 1950, America's shifting demographics caused the number of contributors to shrink to sixteen workers in support of each retiree.

Today there are three.

For America's children there will only be two.