That’s an interesting conclusion to reach, since SSI’s own forecasts(the same ones linked in the article) show, for the most likely payout scenario (Intermediate) the Disability Insurance fund will be “exhausted” (their word) by 2026 and the Old Age portions of the fund will be exhausted in 2041/42. The high cost forecast is even more bleak. The only forecast in which the SSI fund survives is the best case, where lower than normal payouts occur every year for the foreseeable future. Not so likely.
I’ve shown you, with SSI’s own data, why it fits the dictionary definition of a Ponzi scheme. Care to show us why it doesn’t, or is saying so good enough for you? Just saying so was apparently good enough for the Forbes writer.
Again, I’m not against the idea of universal pensions, even government controlled ones, but I am against the current, unsustainable system.
If if comforts you to call SS a Ponzi scheme, feel free. The critical difference is that no “Ponzi scheme” I have ever heard of told investors they were receiving payments from newer investors - the mechanism was concealed and investors are told the operators have a secret trick or are such market geniuses that that they can make enormous returns appear from the capital.
SS has never been secret about how it works, and if it is structured to use a continuing flow of new members to support the benefits of older ones, it’s closer to some insurance schemes and pooled-risk capital investments than to a con game. That it has appeared to be unsustainable from era to era, and that the immediate situation seems to be more so than some past crises it’s gotten past, does not mean it’s a con game or in any meaningful sense a Ponzi scheme… just a national pension scheme that’s poorly structured for modern conditions.
It will be adjusted to fit reality, just as it has been several times in the last 75 years. The near-total inability to touch current benefits and beneficiaries makes it a slow, generational process.
If it helps you sleep better, how about “pyramid scheme”? If it quacks like a duck (even when it doesn’t echo), it’s likely a duck.
SS is not now, nor has it ever been, sustainable without huge increases in money in (investments) and huge decreases in benefits (returns). People across almost every imaginable category are “due” much more in benefits than they paid in. That is not going to happen, not sustainably. The “secret” is exactly that - some generation will not get what they were promised. The only reason that it hasn’t (and likely won’t) collapse is that the government is free to change the rules in the middle of the game. The operator of a Ponzi scheme would never get away with that.
Again, all attempts to brand it with the name of an illegal con game are overlooking the fact that its finances and operation have never been secret.
Con games use one financial mechanism while claiming it’s another. Con games benefit the operators at the cost of the participants, usually in the short run - a year at most, a month in the majority of cases.
SS uses an openly declared financial system and while it can be word-painted different ways by different factions, there is not and never has been any secrecy or misdirection about its operation. It benefits one class of participant at a cost to another class of participant. It always has. Those classes have been progressing through the system for closing in on a century.
If you want to call these the same thing, feel free. FirstAm and all that. But I wouldn’t want to trust your kids to tell me which one’s an elephant and which one’s a rhino. 
What is AARP good for?
Well, let’s not overlook all those wonderful pointless gadgets! I recently saw one in a magazine–a calculator camera! It’s so pointless that I can’t even figure out how to google for it, but in a nutshell, it’s a calculator that’s also a camera. It looks a bit like a smartphone but isn’t even a dumb phone. Just imagine, you can add up a column of numbers and then take a picture of something, or vice versa. But why someone thought this would be particularly useful is beyond me.
Frankly, as someone who recently aged into their demographic, I find many of these items almost insulting, particularly as they are really just marketing come-ons.