My Republican mother did indeed live on middling social security alone for the last 8 or so years of her life. She was never frugal unless she had to be, always buying furniture and stuff, always had debts, pets, no savings, sometimes got free food from foodbanks. I made 30% downpayment and repairs on a house for her in about year 4 of that, she then made full P.I.T. payments from her S.S. until her death on standard 7.5% FHA loan. Of course the biggest expense was healthcare, which didn’t cost her a dime with the loss-leading experimental MA plans she could take advantage of; she ultimately exhausted her 365 Medicare hospital days, and ended her days on Medicaid in a ventilator equipped nursing home, with 60 mile trips to an emergency room once a month. She would have it no other way. Thankfully Texas still exempted homes from medicaid seizure then, but that rule has changed since. I don’t intend to live on Social Security alone, but I still live in that same house, nearly paid off, just in case.
I had always heard since I was in grade school that Social Security was a ponzi scheme, would be broke next year, etc., and believed and repeated these things to her. Despite her hardcore conservative background as an FDR hater, America Firster, not far from where Republicans are now, she brushed all such concerns aside. She also seemed to think Social Security came from Johnson, who was President about the time she originally started collecting survivor’s benefits. The private fixed annuity my father bought for the princely sum of $225,000 in 1963 was inflated away to nearly nothing by 1983 when it ended. The indexing of social security benefits was the thing that really put the security in Social Security back then.
All this taught me there is no substitute for a program like this, and it galls me the same old lies are still being told, and believed by kids, even after my payroll tax was hiked 50% in 1983 to deal with the demographic issue.
I understand quite well that future benefits paid by the future workers, another reason I think everything possible should be done to improve our most important resource, the human resource. It puzzles me that people who have private investments are in that same boat too, but never think about it that way, they seem to think their hard saved money grows under special lamps in Wall Street.
