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First Social Security Recipient Paid in $24.75 and Received $22,888.92

Economic Prism  ( Original )
MAR 2, 2018

You’re reading that right. That’s not a typo. We’re not talking about some system that was brilliantly engineered from the beginning and was tragically waylaid by some unforeseen tsunamic shock.

Ida May Fuller, through no Machiavellian genius of her own, got a 924.8% return on her money. Doomed to fail, literally, from Check 1.

What makes this unsustainable scheme any more legitimate than the ones they put private citizens in jail for? Exactly the same thing that makes the US dollar worth anything at all. Because the US government says it is.

The first ones into a Ponzi scheme always make out like bandits.  For example, Ida May Fuller cashed the first Social Security check, Check No. 00-000-001, dated January 31, 1940, in the amount of $22.54.  With just one check, she nearly recouped the full value of the $24.75 that she paid in.

However, Fuller continued to cash these checks until she died on January 27, 1975.  In total, the $24.75 she paid in, ended up paying $22,888.92 back out to her.  Is it any surprise this system is now on the fritz?

Medicare, another marque social safety net of the U.S. government, is also based on the broken promise that people can get more money out of something than they pay in.  Like Social Security, Medicare faces a funding gap that’s mathematically insurmountable.  People that have paid into these systems their entire working lives have been set up for a grand disappointment.

ORIGINAL SOURCE: Broken Promises by MN Gordon at Economic Prism on 3/2/18