Ida May Fuller

Yeah.

Uh, the first benefit was paid to Ida May Fuller in 1940.

The kind of wave of benefits after that were kind of slowly increased as you had longer work histories feeding into the benefit claiming.

And-

The biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world is Social Security.

The very first recipient was named Ida Mae Fuller.

She paid in, I forget the exact number, maybe $20, $22 total and got thousands in benefits.

She paid in for like three weeks and got benefits the day she died.

Again, make it make sense.

This is, um, man, I, I talked about Ida May Fuller here.

I pulled up the information, uh, again.

Um, first Social Security check ever mailed turned $24.75 into 22,888.

Ida May Fuller paid payroll taxes for three years, collected benefits for 35, got a 924 times return.

Every dollar came from the paychecks of workers younger than her.

That's how it works.

Now there are two.

All right? The very first monthly check at that time went to a woman named Ida May Fuller.

Cato figures that she paid in about five hundred dollars, and adjusted for c- inflation, she collected about, I kid you not, half a million dollars.

[laughs] I'm not kidding.

How much was the very first Social Security benefit check? The answer is $22.54.

The check went to retired legal secretary Ida Mae Fuller on January 31st, 1940.

It carried check number 00-000-001.

And just like that, that's today's show on a Monday.

All of that has increased the burden on younger workers.

Another issue with Social Security is that it's always been a political program where the earliest generations received massive windfalls, including the first Social Security repres- uh, recipient, Ida Fuller, receiving about a thousand percent return on the very small taxes she paid into the program, and we're still trying to dig out of that hole.

A better system would enable younger, uh, Americans, especially those, uh, with middle and higher incomes, to save and invest more on their own, while reducing, uh, Social Security's role to one that provides a predictable anti-poverty benefit instead of wage replacement that, uh, sends the biggest checks to the highest income earners.

The current system is unfair and it's, uh, unsustainable.

I think that's a bipartisan proposal that most people could get behind.

It also wouldn't really cost any money because it would encourage more work.

Uh, but to your broader question, Gopi, I agree that this program is extremely outdated, and what we saw in the 1950s when those spousal and survivor benefits were phased in is that we saw a huge drop in the ratio of workers paying into the program to recipients receiving benefits from the program from 16 down to today below three.

And the reason that occurred is that all of a sudden, many more, uh, individuals, uh, non-working spouses, uh, children and dependents became eligible for a benefit that they didn't contribute to, and that wasn't actuarially fair.

I, I find her story, uh, so, uh, interesting.

Ida Fuller, uh, paid in about 23 US dollars in taxes and collected a thousand times return, uh, by the time of her death, over $23,000, which in today's terms would be about a half a million, uh, dollars.

And so it just shows that these early generations, um, got these massive returns because they paid in very little and got out a lot, but we're still digging through that legacy debt now, which is, uh, where s- part of the unfunded obligation that we're dealing with, uh, comes from.

from.So you've described the current system as something like Robin Hood in reverse, with younger gen- younger people who generally have less accumulated wealth subsidizing older Americans who are, on average, uh, have had decades to accumulate assets.