A reader shared with me an email he got from an acquaintance. It is a Social Security screed that is filled with half-baked ideas, exaggerations and outright lies. The reader said he had never heard of these allegations before. But I pointed out to him that the harangue has been around for decades. 40 years ago, it was passed from one naive knucklehead to another by regular mail and by fax. Today, of course, it floats around in the online world. Sadly, thousands, if not millions, read it and believe it to be true. I've tackled the tirade in more than a few past columns. But I guess it's time to do so again.

It starts out with a couple of paragraphs lambasting the government for calling Social Security checks "federal benefit payments." The writer says that Social Security is not a "benefit." He says, "It's our money that we earned. How dare the government call it a benefit?"

By the way, bear in mind that the guy (and I'll bet my next ten Social Security checks it was a guy) who originally wrote this misleading missive did so 40 or 50 years ago and has probably long since died. But amazingly, his rant lives on. New generations of Gullible Gus's read it and get hot under the collar.

But why? I'm sure that conspiracy-minded ninnies are convinced the wording is some sinister attempt by government officials to take away their rights and their money. But I mean — come on! Everybody knows that you work and pay Social Security taxes and that one day the money comes back to you. And the money you get back is in the form of a "benefit" that comes from the "federal" government in a monthly "payment." Federal ... Benefit ... Payment. These are just words. Don't try to read evil or ominous meanings into them.

Next, the writer trots out the disingenuous claim that if you had taken all that money the mean-old government took from you in the form of Social Security taxes and invested it, you would be a multi-millionaire today.

Gosh, isn't that wonderful! We would all be millionaires today if it weren't for that devious old Social Security system that is stripping us all of untold riches. For example, just think back to those times before Social Security came along in the 1930s, when the country was just full of millionaires because no one was taking Social Security taxes out of their paychecks. Those sure were the good old days!

I'm not going to spend too much time discussing the fallacies of the "we'd all be millionaires" claims. But I am going to discuss the numbers people use to come up with these meaningless arguments. (And I said the numbers "people" use because it wasn't just this one old goat 40 or 50 years ago who came up with these misleading allegations. Countless folks over the years have made the same misguided miscalculations.)

And here is where they all go wrong. When they are figuring out how much money has been taken away from them in Social Security taxes (money they supposedly would have been religiously investing), they always use the figure 15.3%. In other words, they claim that 15.3% of their income has been withheld from them.

But the money actually withheld from their paychecks for Social Security taxes is only 6.2%. So where do they get 15.3%? Well, first, they look at their own paycheck and see that 7.65% has been withheld from them. But that includes 1.45% that is used to fund the Medicare hospital insurance program. You just can't add that Medicare portion of the tax into any Social Security payback calculations.

Then, the next mistake they make is to add in the employer's portion of the Social Security/Medicare tax. In other words, they claim the 7.65% employers pay into Social Security was their money that their employer was sending into Social Security on their behalf. But that is just not the case. What employers pay into Social Security is simply a tax that they pay to the government. It is not your money they are sending to the government.

If you want proof of that — consider this. Say Social Security was abolished tomorrow. Do you think your employer is then going to turn around and say, "Hey, we are increasing your salary by 7.65% because, after all, this is your money we've been sending to Washington for you." Not a chance! To repeat: it's not your money. It's just a tax that employers pay.

So anyway, when you are doing these "what did I pay into Social Security calculations," you have to use 6.2% of your income, not 15.3%. (By the way, I totally understand that self-employed people pay 12.4% of their net profit into Social Security, but these screeds I am talking about are always written by wage-earners.)

Next, the rant writer brings up this timeworn and untruthful argument. It goes like this: "Congress has stolen Social Security money to pay for other programs." That assertion comes from a misunderstanding of how the Social Security program is financed. In a nutshell, here is how it really works,

As soon as every nickel in Social Security tax collections lands in Washington, D.C., it is immediately converted into U.S. Treasury notes. I own some treasury bonds. You probably do, too. What is the government doing with that money we invested in those bonds? It is spending it, of course. But we still hold the notes. And when we redeem them, we get repaid, with interest. It works the same way with the treasury notes held by the Social Security system, except, of course, on a much larger scale. If you want to learn more about how that works, do a Google search for "Social Security Office of the Actuary" and noodle around in all the Social Security investment data they make available to the public.

Finally, the diatribe writer trots out the tired old "Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme" allegation. As I have pointed out a hundred times in this column, Social Security is not now, never has been and never will be an investment scheme. Instead, it is a social insurance program that, in addition to providing a base of income support to retirees, for people with disabilities and for the spouses and families of a worker who has died, is also intended to accomplish larger social goals for our country. If you need proof that the social goals of the Social Security program are being met, just consider this. Before Social Security was established in 1935, almost 80% of senior citizens in this country were living below the poverty level. Today, the number is less than 10%. And that's even though we are not all millionaires because we never got a chance to invest the Social Security taxes stolen from us!

If you have a Social Security question, Tom Margenau has two books with all the answers. One is called "Social Security — Simple and Smart: 10 Easy-to-Understand Fact Sheets That Will Answer All Your Questions About Social Security." The other is "Social Security: 100 Myths and 100 Facts." You can find the books at Amazon.com or other book outlets. Or you can send him an email at [email protected]. To find out more about Tom Margenau and to read past columns and see features from other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Tasha Lyn at Unsplash