To preserve the amount. private funds fluctuate and you could lose a significant amount of savings, which could devastate an account in late age.
The point of privatizing isn't that the government is incompetent, it is that, SS is a secure low return fund, which is useless to anyone but those near or in retirement. Younger people can take the fluctuations since they won't collect in the short run.
I would suggest that's bad.
First off, if you have your money in a private retirement fund that you personally own, and it has your name on it.... that gives legal rights. You can't lose your investment. Not possible. Those shares you buy, you now own. They are yours.
If you sell off those investments, and give that money to Social Security, you lose all your rights. That money is given to the Federal Government, and spent. it's gone.
And if the government has a fiscal crisis and decides to not pay, then you just lost all your money. You can say that isn't likely, but the fact is, you can lose your money.
All the way back to post 1 of this thread. The supreme court of this country, said that you as a citizen have zero legal right to social security. If my mutual fund does not sell those assets and give me money I am legally entitle to, I'll take them to court. If the government denies me, I'm done. That's it. I have no legal standing.
Additional, if I have $2 Million dollars I've saved up and invested, and I die.... that money isn't lost. I can give it to my relatives or my grand kids, or my spouse. I could even donate it to a charity, or even a close loved friend. People I really care about.
But if I give that money to social security, and I die... it's gone. I lose it. Everything I spent my life saving, is taken from me, and spent on government kick backs to political supporters.
That's horrible!
So if someone.... for whatever ungodly reason.... actually wants to sell their investments and keep their money in social security, then by all means let them have that choice.
But no, I absolutely do not want to be locked in, that at a certain age, my investments revert to government. No. No no no. Absolutely not. Defeats the whole point of pushing this.
By the way....
You shouldn't do that anyway. If you have it locked in, then what happens if the market crashes right before that lock happens? What if my lock date was March of 2009, when the market bottomed out? I'd lose half my retirement, when if I only kept my stocks, I would recover nearly all of it in 2 years.
I was actually buying stock all during 2008. I was losing money every single day for moneys. I'd put money in, and find the value was lower than before I put the money in. But you have to remember, I'm buying stock. The number of stocks I owned, was more and more each day, even while the values were dropping. By the time I got done, I had a 25% return on my investment.
If I had been forced to pull out because of this lock into SS, I would have lost money. Bad idea.
Plus, even with the fluctuations, you are still getting dividend payments. If you take your money out and put it into SS, you lose dividend payments. No good reason for this at all.
