I don’t think I can take much more of this. As someone on the edge of retirement, I have to hear the Republicans scheming to kill social security, which is bad enough, but here’s Ed Zitron predicting the complete obliteration of retirement funds thanks to the imminent detonation of the AI bubble.
Unfortunately, it all makes sense. Our economy seems to be dedicated to pumping up the fortunes of about a dozen people, and I’m not one of them.
That this is a really bad idea is obvious.
.1. Social Security and Medicare are self funding programs.
They have zero to do with our annual deficits or our National Debt.
,2, Social Security will never run out of money!!!
What will happen in the worst case is that in 2032, payouts will exceed paid in + surplus.
This means that benefits will have to be reduced to 79% of the current amounts.
.3. This is a disaster but 79% is a whole lot better than 0%.
.4. That this will happen has been known for decades. It is simple math.
There are simple and obvious ways to fix this. Neither the GOP or the Democrats have had the courage and abilities to fix this.
.5. The Republicans have been trying to kill Social Security since Roosevelt introduced it in 1936. For no real reason except that it helps all US residents and they are horrible people.
Social Security has been a very successful program and is wildly popular and a part of life for almost all Americans.
You can live on just Social Security as a retirement income.
It’s not easy and you are not going to have a high standard of living most of the time but it is possible.
I volunteer with a program for low income seniors and disabled.
They are all on Social Security.
They are at least housed in reasonable conditions. None of them have cars though because they can’t afford them.
Some of them also get Food Stamps (SNAP).
Before they got on Social Security, some of them were homeless.
For these people, cuts in Social Security benefits will be a disaster.
PS: Social Security is often called an “entitlement”.
This isn’t accurate.
It is a pension plan. Those payouts are your money, that you paid in.
To be clear, they are called an “entitlement” by the GOP, because, to the GOP everything is either something you “didn’t earn”, i.e., didn’t lie, cheat, or steal, via legal loopholes, or something you are “entitled to”, which, in their case is, again, only the right to lie, cheat, or steal from other people. Calling it such is exactly identical to “family values” to them – its something they don’t actually have, redefine to mean horrible things, when they do claim to have it, and willfully deny to everyone else. The “rich” are “entitled”, but will never call it this, but will instead call it, “earned through hard work”. The poor, to them, are entitled to nothing, and actually earn what they have through hard work, and thus, in their backwards world, “do not deserve anything, and are acting like they are entitled to it.”
Also, no, nothing the government has, for anything, no matter what its specifically earmarked for, collected for, etc., is, in their twisted world, “your money”, its their money, and they only call it “your money” when they intend to lie, cheat you of it, or steal it outright for some other purpose.
Literally the only thing they know how to do is doublespeak. And, lets be honest here, they do this religiously (starting with their religion and its own twisted definitions, like “free will” meaning, “Do what I say, or I will torture you for not doing it.”)
In other words, as I’ve been saying for years: plutocratic crapitallism destroys anyone who is not a billionaire magat. All that to further their insatiable desire for obscene wealth and power. Here are recent examples:
Americans now know beyond any reasonable doubt that they’re on the losing side of a class war, and are justifiably pissed, . . . the monied interests were screwing them over
by Robert Reich | June 23, 2026
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-reich/117363/class-warriors-class-worriers-and-class-wimps
and
GOP has a new plan to kill off Medicare and Social Security
https://www.salon.com/2026/06/13/gop-has-a-new-plan-to-kill-off-medicare-and-social-security/
and from the richest, bigliest ahole of them all:
‘Time to Sue This Liar’: Trillionaire Elon Musk Threatens Ro Khanna for Warning of 4.5 Million Child Deaths From DOGE Cuts
https://www.commondreams.org/news/elon-musk-ro-khanna</ii
Of course shithead schumer and jerkoff jeffries aren’t worried. They have their own wealth to protect them and they don’t give a rat’s rectum about us!
I get Zitron’s newsletter by email. He borders on hyperbole, but the essence of what he writes is true and should scare the crap out of us.
Hey magat aholes! IF YOU RUIN SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE, YOU WILL BE STEALING FROM MILLIONS OF PEOPLE. We paid into social security and medicare for decades as an involuntary investment.
Lets get the torches and pitchforks ready!
There are mathematical models (now apparently confirmed by observation) that predict wealth to automatically accumulate at the actors that are already richest.
It would probably be an interesting task to calculate how incompetent these actors are allowed to be in these models for this process to continue…
My reply to @7 drdrdrdrdralhazeneuler regarding ‘calculate how incompetent these actors are allowed to be in these models for this process to continue…’
We don’t need to calculate it. It has been clearly shown for decades that the ‘monied’ have achieved wealth growth momentum that is almost impossible to wreck with their incompetence. Prime example the magat-in-chief tRUMP!
Ah yes, the AI Bubble which has always been just about to collapse, since 2022.
Thing doesn’t work, you see.
Here he is in Oct 2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEOxgDWDxLA
I think I’m a few years behind you, PZ, but I and most of the people I grew up with have worked our whole lives paying into Social Security and just assuming it would get pirated by politicians and go bankrupt before we could collect it. This doesn’t make it ok by any stretch of the imagination, only makes it less of a surprise.
@10 — Perfect. Exactly the attitude these thugs need to push this agenda through.
@7, Sure. But there are mathematical models for all sortsa things of what will happen unless we intervene. I mean climate change most obviously, but what happens on an icy road that bends and is on the edge of a cliff? Why cars slide off to fiery death hundreds of metres below. The mathematics says so after all. So we intervene: We put up guard rails, seed limits or even close roads.if we have to.
Wealth accumulation among a few is not inevitable.
Kinda is. We are status monkeys, as a species.
Point is more that, beyond a certain threshold, wealth accumulates faster than any normal person can spend it, and the accumulation accelerates by its structural characteristics, the formula being (r > g)
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacKenzie_Scott
and
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century
Yeah, the mathematical model. Basically, anything that grows by “preferential attachment” will end up with what’s known as a power law distribution (very different from “normal distribution,” AKA the bell curve) where a few have a lot, and most have very little. It happens in all kinds of completely unrelated systems.
The internet grew like this; as more sites came online and linked to already existing sites, those links were more likely to go to sites that already had the most links. So you have a few giants and a large number of obscure sites with few or even no links. Cities grow that way, with more people moving where there are already more people. Companies selling products will see their market share growing (or not growing) that way. Hell, blobs floating across a screen and sticking to each other will grow clumps whose sizes make up a power law distribution.
Unfortunately, wealth grows that way, too. Thing is, a very slight advantage in the beginning of the process grows and grows all out of proportion to that initial advantage. And that advantage could be anything: a very slightly better product, an earlier entry into the market, a better location to live, whatever.
Or it could just be dumb luck.
Of course, conservatives see it as a fair system, because it’s what happens when there is no regulation of growth, or sharing or taxation or anything else to even things out. And it is fair, at least for some superficial definitions of the word. One problem, though, is that conservatives always make the jump to thinking those huge accumulations of wealth are deserved, or earned, through hard work or genius, and never attribute it to dumb luck or an advantageous starting position, or the blind workings of a system that rewards an early edge out of proportion.
And they never ask maybe the most important question of all: is it actually good for society as a whole?
Honestly, PZ, I don’t want to tell you what to do with your own blog, but what level of cynical trolling does it take for beholder to get banned? Their latest comment is an outright lie that insults an entire commentariat with zero meaningful content…and since he makes it clear that he despises the other commenters here, why does he keep posting?
@15 chrislawson — I think your comment was intended for the previous thread, not this one?
We’ve all heard this often because it is a common cynical viewpoint.
It isn’t all that likely though.
.1. One of my older relatives said this often, starting in the 1970s.
He died recently in his 90s.
He also collected Social Security for 35 years.
So much for that prediction.
.2. As I mentioned above, Social Security by itself will never die.
It is a self funding program and the worst that could happen is reducing the payouts to match the incoming revenue stream. This means in 2032, benefits get cut to 79% of present. Unless something is done to fix it, an easy task if the political will is there.
.3. Fixing Social Security, letting in run on automatic pilot, or killing it dead are…choices.
The GOP wants to kill it just because they like to kill things.
.4. FWIW, the GOP rarely talk about their true goal, murdering Social Security.
They always lie about it.
They will claim that they want to make it new, improved, and better by…privatizing it.
Of course, there are multiple things wrong with this idea.
Starting with the fact that Social Security is already privatized!!!
That is what 401(K) plans, IRAs, and Roth IRAs are for.
Many or most people have one or all three of those in addition to Social Security.
@15 chrislawson
Oh hello, I didn’t see you there.
Not true.
As esoteric as it may seem on the outside, I do have meaningful interactions here. Giving that up would mean saying goodbye to people I consider to be internet friends or pen pals, even if that may or may not be reciprocated.
Not good for many reasons.
.1. Our form of oligarchic capitalism has a built in drop dead feature.
When the ultra rich oligarchies have all the money and the other 99 +% has very little,…then who is left to buy things and services? Consumer spending is 70% of the US economy. (Robert Reich points this out often.)
.2. It is known that as societies become more and more unequal in wealth distribution, they also become more unstable. You can see this in the USA in the last few decades. We are now the richest Third World country and very unstable.
[meta]
Name one. Just one. One commenter who is your internet friend or pen pal.
I am familiar with commenters here.
(Obs, I think that was pure bluster)
—
I quote your very own words that you addressed to PZ: “You wield a Blue MAGA commentariat who attempts to shame anyone who actually does stop doing that.”
I am neither Blue nor MAGA, but I can for fucking sure you are dissing this very which includes you.
(Reflexiveness takes a tad of mental competence, and you clearly are not thus burdened)
—
Bah. Weak attempted exculpation.
@20 John Morales
You know, I actually enjoy reading your posts sometimes. I think that counts.
Of course it’s very silly to claim that everyone here is Blue MAGA. Blue MAGA is mixed in there, though — one weird trick to get them all agitated at the same time <a href=https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/10/29/id-rather-be-voting-for-bernie”>is for PZ to say “I’d rather be voting for Bernie”.
I assure I am not your friend nor pen pal.
Obs, it having been pure bluster, there are none to name.
Already told you that is a remarkably stupid insult, ‘Blue MAGA’ being an oxymoron.
Yeah. Troll with bullshit claims, that sure works.
The more one thinks about them, the stupider they seem.
(Like saying MAGAs are Red Liberals? ;)
<snicker>
Over who? See, there are only ever two candidates for Prez.
Do you not get to what ‘rather’ refers? Instead of, basically.
dennyk@16–
It is an accidental cross-post indeed. My apologies.
[mmm]
Now I feel a bit bad. You tried, beholder.
You have kept grace, if nothing else.
FWIW, you too have made some decent comments, just not about politics.
Computing and IT-related stuff, you make sense.
(Still not your pal, but. But you earned that)
Wow yet another thread went way off-piste. Go figure.
Backing up the truck, the alarming part of the video, which PZ himself had separated from the also troublesome topic of Social Security funding and potential benefit cuts, is that the AI sector drying up or dying out in a bubble pop could result in serious problems for…wait for it…PENSIONS. PZ used the term retirement funds, but when I just watched the video this guy was talking about PENSIONS being impacted hard. That’s scary.
So…when one retires on a precarious pension and Social Security itself gets a haircut, retirees will need to re-enter the job market. The American Dream (1) with a little Freddy Krueger twist at the end.
(1) Yeah let’s spend 10-15 comments on how American really means USian, because that’s the important thing here. [thinking pre-emptively]
@17 raven
Funny… While I don’t know much about ROTHs, either flavor, I have always had the impressing that the whole point of 401ks was less about retirement (and I am damn sure that the one I have through the place I work at is utterly useless for this, if that is the point of them), was to let companies gamble with the money via the stock market, before giving you some of it, not pay you at all, if they found ways to declare bankruptcy, and “restructured”, and not have to pay you anything at all if they just take all their money, run away, and close the business, in the later cases, causing the 410k to vanish along with the company (or what ever the company used to be named before it was restructured). Note: My brother had this happen to him 4 times, at the same company, because they kept giving the top people big retirement packages, then “declared bankruptcy”, then “sold the company”, which immediately renamed itself something nearly identical to the original name, only to then repeat this exact process again, as soon as the law said they could once more declare themselves insolvent, and give out new golden parachutes to top execs, before “selling the company”. Ah, the glories of modern “investment banking”…. He eventually quit, but, to this day, even in retirement, has got not one single cent from any 401k he might have had from them, because the law places those as lowest priority for, “These people need to be paid first, with what ever money you have, if you go bankrupt.” Nope, workers are not “investors”, and its investors that get paid out first. The 401k… is just a program they can throw away, and never look at again, when the business “fails”, somehow.
All of these options are, of course, bullshit to start with, because they exist as “replacements” for what companies used to be required to do, before the government decided to stop giving tax incentives for a) hiring workers, and b) actually giving them retirements, and instead let companies throw all those things away, in favor of other bullshit methods of getting similar, but much bigger, tax breaks – by, often, doing jack shit for their employees, cutting the number of employees they have, replacing them with other things, and/or stabbing their own employees in the back in various ways, while pretending the be charitable. My favorite, of course, is, “Have our customers give us lots of money, which they can’t themselves tell the IRS are donations, then take credit for millions of dollars in donations, using the money our customers just gave us!”
@17 raven and @26 Kagehi discussed social security and retirement plans.
As I have said: Social Security is an involuntary retirement plan that people (except billionaire aholes) pay into for decades. And, it works well, to a limited degree, for many.
Banksters own the 401K’s and as Kagehi said, they run them only for their own benefit. Banksters are the ‘money changers’ for the crapitallist economy which are parasites feeding on the investment by the hard working populace. Join a credit union. They are not as great as they once were, but you are a member and they (should and almost always do) work for your benefit.
The stock market is a fraudulent scam controlled and manipulated by the wealthy for the wealthy. It dooms the ‘little guy’ to fail whether investing on their own or through bankster entities.
The overwhelming and uncontrollable crapitallist economy dooms the populace to be victims of the crapitallist economy, limited to a life of working their asses off for otthers’ benefit.
If you think this is hyperbole, I say, stop drinking the crapitallist koolaid and educate yourself with the facts!
Maybe joining the DSA and Mamdani is not a bad idea.
Only if you trust that person’s acumen and predictive power.
I reckon it’s hyperbole.
The sector is fairly well-regulated, too.
cf. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-issues/asset-backed-pensions/Annual-survey-of-investment-regulation-of-pension-providers-2026.pdf