I was born at the back end of the baby boom. If I get 50% of the projected benefits I'll be amazed. It's more likely to be 25%.
Far too pessimistic IMO. Even after the trust fund runs out current policy (without any fixes) would have the payout at ~ 75% of current levels. I'm in the same age range as you and will be amazed if our benefits are not 100% - cutting them will require political fortitude that I just don't see in the current government.
Don't you understand that there is NO social security trust fund. It does not exist. There is no money stashed away to fund this. There are no investments stashed away to pay for this. There are a bunch of IOUs from the Federal Government to itself. That is all.
I'll make it simple. You give me a bunch of money and put it in my right pocket. I write an IOU to myself and put the IOU in my right pocket, then spend all the cash you gave me. Some of it goes to people who already retired but the rest just disappears in my torrent of spending.
You ask how much I have in my right pocket trust fund for you. I add up all the IOUs I wrote to myself and tell you. You go away happy because I just bamboozled you.
At some point you will ask for the money back. Now, my scam has been working great because there have been lots more people paying into my right pocket than I've had to pay out. I can cash flow the payments to my "investors" out of current receipts.
But it won't continue to work when the baby boomers start retiring because there will be so many of them that there won't be enough people working to pay for it out of current social security receipts. Those IOUs will have to be called in.
You might have noticed that the Federal Government is 16 to 17 TRILLION dollars in debt and that debt amount is rising. The only reason we aren't in deeper doo-doo is that the interest rates are so very low. If the interest rates rise our debt will skyrocket and all kinds of things won't get paid for.
The ability of "all the workers in the US" to pay for all that debt plus the social security debt likely doesn't exist without dramatic defunding of a host of governmental activities.
The only way the government can pay for it all without formally defaulting on the debt is to either go MMM on expenditures or to inflate the hell out of the currency. If they go the latter, they'll pretend to pay out what's owed but they will monkey with the numbers to factor out inflation protection. If you've been following the news, they've already started weakening the inflation protections.
Anybody actually believe the feds will voluntarily embrace MMM style spending? I don't.