Well, their interpretation is at odds with reality, and they should reconcile that. Regardless of what they told or what they believed, they paid into a system where they were forced to subsidize current recipients, while the system itself could be revoked at any point, leaving them high and dry, and not running into 14th Amendment issues or anything like that. See Flemming v. Nestor, 1960 - quoting Wiki:

Flemming v. Nestor, 363 U.S. 603 (1960), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the constitutionality of Section 1104 of the 1935 Social Security Act. In this Section, Congress reserved to itself the power to amend and revise the schedule of benefits. The Court rejected that Social Security is a system of ‘accrued property rights’ and held that those who pay into the system have no contractual right to receive what they have paid into it.[1]

Note that I’m not saying anything “should” be one way or another, besides that people should be fully aware how the current system works in law.

Social Security’s “trust fund” is an empty pit of debt obligations. Benefits to current recipients are paid with incoming payroll taxes. Any difference is made up with additional taxes or monetary inflation, by way of Treasury bonds. They “reinvest it in the economy” if there’s ever a surplus, e.g., through military contractors. It finances the national debt.

Putting aside the quirks of that setup, the basic function is that the taxes you pay in now are not an investment in your own future, you’re basically just paying for the retirement of older people now. The expectation is that someone down the road will then pay taxes to finance your retirement. Hence, how SS was able to start paying benefits almost immediately (3 years) after payroll taxes started being collected.

What is your prediction for what will become of it, though. GDP growth stops and people start bursting into flames? You know we’ve actually observed this before, right?

Now, if you do mean “capitalism” not in the plain definition of “an economy based around private ownership”, but the more specific version where control of capital is highly centralized - there’s some truth to the idea that economic decline can cause people to start looking to reform that system. True of any system, really, because people generally don’t want to see their quality of life decrease. But that’s very different than an economic system “requiring” it to function.

Capitalism does not “collapse” with 0 or negative GDP growth. I don’t know where people got this idea. You only really see any sort of “collapse” if the social structure breaks down - the basic behaviors of trading continue even in extreme crises, insofar as a society operates with property assigned to individuals like that. Not counting “bubbles” and such as a “collapse”.

Unfortunately our own pensions and such are also getting wiped out by the same forces. And with less access to insider information.

According to…that woman with a book about his wealth? Article says 70 to 200 btw, not 200. Sources elsewhere guess much lower (tens of billions).

US GDP is 27.72 trillion. That’s the movement of money annually.

Yes, Putin’s in charge, with his one hundred million dollars (sarcasm, not exact figure) and zero sway over the entire Western economic establishment.

If you look at the entire span of all cultures and all history, I think there’s tons of random examples of essentially one form or another of religious or ideological thinking that caused massive atrocities. Genghis Khan comes to mind as someone responsible for millions of deaths through, as the author of your first link puts it, a kind of “mouth with a bottomless pit” mentality of devouring everything. Hitler is distinguished in part by the mechanization of his efforts, but that is true of every imperialist genocide of the 20th and 21st centuries. The people he killed in open genocide don’t even scratch a tenth of the total killed by both sides in that same war - which really begs the question, what is the distinction between war and genocide? Combatants vs. non-combatants? If someone is talked into fighting, does their life suddenly stop having any value? Is it less a crime in ethical terms, not legal terms, to kill an average soldier? It gets justified by saying the other side of a conflict had some devastatingly evil ideology, but is killing someone actually the best way to deal with them having evil ideas? I’m more inclined to take the stance uh, I think Steinbeck said, “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” The deepest evil is the people leading us to slaughter each other, not the people we’re slaughtering.

It’s not laymen, it’s a journalist. Their job is to accurately describe the truth.

Bro… Not historical Nazis? You mean the ones that committed the most despicable evils in all of humanity’s written history?

Just reading that a few times and I think, how exactly do you determine that? The number of deaths? Because the genocide of indigenous people in the “Americas” exceeds it several times over. You think about the “Congo Free State”, it had deaths on the same order of magnitude and a system of total enslavement and mass mutilations/executions based on failing to meet work quotas. Not to trivialize one, but to make sure others aren’t ignored. When it comes to the genocide conversation, it seems like European imperialism in Africa just gets completely left out.

Increase the number of participants in an economy, increases both supply and demand for labor, long story short. “Immigrants taking our jobs” is the stupidest talking point in human history.

There’s no such thing as any cleanly delineated race or ethnicity, save for maybe some people who’ve been isolated on an island for a thousand years. But it is a natural response to the weaponized term “antisemitism” being used against defenders of Palestinians, to point out that both groups are described as “semitic”.

It is factually incorrect. It is not giving them money, it is taking less money from them. That has different consequences under tax law and describing it that way also completely muddles people’s understanding of how the budget works.

I hate the language around the federal budget. First, how budget figures are reporting in 10 year intervals, when everything else is reported in 1 year intervals. So everything sounds 10 times bigger. When like only 5% of the population ever looks at the federal budget, this creates a TON of confusion.

Second, how reductions in tax (like to the rich) are reported as “giveaways”. Taxes go in, not out. That’s a reduction in revenue, not an expenditure or liability. You can say, “shift the tax burden even more onto the lower and middle classes”. Then it’s actually accurate. Getting fired from your job is not an expense, it’s a loss of income. Same thing.

I only see one country bragging about influencing U.S. election outcomes, and it’s not Russia. You guys constructed Pepe Silvia-level theories about Russian influence and ignored the domestic corporatocracy and entire U.S. empire in favor of the media’s chosen explanation of “Russian influence”. As the saying more or less goes, nobody is immune to propaganda, including you. Modern propaganda narratives include accusations of propaganda leveled at the propaganda narrative’s scapegoats.

“Did you stop beating your wife yet?”

History will look back at the American empire and judge all its complicit civilians equally. It’s Democrat vanity that makes them think they’re not in the same genocidal boat as Republicans. You may think of yourselves in another class, but your politicians were complicit in the same crimes.

I am already remembering why I walked away the last time I made the mistake of talking to this guy.

Because the direction “left” doesn’t actually have any inherent relationship to political ideologies, but people strive for some kind of ideological purity, especially to draw a contrast with a fundamentally unjust society?

Had that same conversation with a coworker many years back. He pitched the “time is money” theory. Really, I’m salaried, this is off-hours work, I actually find it interesting and enjoyable, and save a fortune doing it, so that theory doesn’t apply very well.