This is the Cato Daily podcast for Wednesday, November 13th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown. Social Security is a welfare program for old people.

There is no such thing as the Social Security Trust Fund.

No matter how much you've paid in, you're not legally entitled to receive benefits.

Those are just a few of the difficult facts of the matter when it comes to social security,

and yet misconceptions remain.

And the program is in desperate need of reform.

Kater's Romina Bacha is author of a new paper on the subject.

We spoke last week.

As a devotee of memes and somebody who lives

in rural America, the crabgrass frontier, if you will. I see a lot of posts by older friends.

Basically, I think they're falling into a trap a little bit with respect to

social security benefits. And the view is essentially, hey, I earned it. I paid in, and now it's my

time to get stuff back out. And that, well, there's, it doesn't seem like there's actually a lot of evidence in law or how we actually have social security structured to make that true in any sense. I mean, they might feel entitled to it, but the legal entitlement. It's just not there.

It's not.

Even the Supreme Court has determined that, because that question has come up before the

court.

But I also, in defense of your older friends who have this view, it is not surprising.

This framing of Social Security being somehow different from other federal government welfare programs was no accident. It's very intentional.

If you think back when Social Security originated in 1935, you had a strong culture of self-reliance in the United States.

And the only benefits that the government provided were to veterans, which people understood

as a benefit based on service, not something unearned, right?

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