WTF,
You are only looking at principal. Nobody puts money into a fund or account every week for 40+ years without seeing a return on investment. Using your silly argument they should have put it under the mattress.
Originally Posted by Budman
Here is another example just for your slow ass!
http://m.startribune.com/opinion/?id=124889549
Take a hypothetical employee who entered the workforce in 1965 and retired in 2010, and assume that employee earned the country's median income throughout his career. That person and his employer would have paid about $23,000 in Medicare taxes by the time the employee retired.
If the amount contributed each year had been put into a savings account earning 5 percent interest, there would have been a balance in the employee's account at the end of the employee's career of about $50,000.
The annual average benefit paid to Medicare participants today is about $11,700. Of that amount, most Medicare beneficiaries pay an annual premium of about $1,200, leaving a net average cost of just over $10,000.
So it would only take about five years to exhaust the contributions made by the employee,
assuming that those contributions would have been placed in a savings account.
However, the average life expectancy at age 65 is now 18 years, meaning the money put into the system for our hypothetical employee would run out 13 years before the employee dies.
The federal government currently estimates that after deducting the premiums Medicare beneficiaries pay, the total cost for the average beneficiary for his or her lifetime will be more than $250,000.
Even if we discount those future benefits to their current net present value (basically the amount you would need in savings today to pay for the average person's Medicare benefits) the average employee's contributions still cover less than one-third of the cost.