From the March 13, 2024, edition of Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show

BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Politicians obviously have an incentive to keep kicking the can down the road and pretending that we have unlimited borrowing power and limited money to pay for a ballooning public debt. That, of course, is their incentive structure. But I'm not running for office, so I can tell you the truth, which is that if we don't raise the retirement age, or privatize Social Security over time or make any changes to Social Security, we will go insolvent. Social Security is not, in fact, a lockbox. I saw a lot of tweets yesterday from people saying, I paid into Social Security. I'm just taking out what I got in. No. You're not. You absolutely are not. The government stole your money and paid it to somebody else. And now they're stealing somebody else's money and paying it to you. And I promise you that whatever you paid in is certainly not what you're getting out. You're either getting out way less. In my case, you're getting way less in Social Security if ever you receive it than you paid in. And in many cases, you're receiving far more.

So my grandmother, for example, receiving Social Security, got way more than she paid in. Because Social Security is not a defined — it is not a defined contributions plan, it's a defined benefits plan. And Social Security tells you how much you receive, but it has nothing to do with how much you put in.

Social Security is a pyramid scheme. It is a Ponzi scheme. We are taking out trillions of dollars in debt to fund people retiring from work who are not somehow unable to work. That was the point that I'm making is that many of the people that we are paying not to work right now are 65 years old. Yes. They paid into the system. But that is because the system should not have taken their money in the first place. You should not have your money taken away from you by the federal government and then spent somewhere else. And then later, somebody else has to fill you in. You should be able to keep your own money. That's how you plan for retirement.