Look at the citizen’s confidence level in cpfLife vs SSA

• the amount of cpfLife income is adequate given the cost of retirement
• most of my friends tell me they rely on cpfLife
• https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/3-top-ranked-dividend-stocks%3A-a-smarter-way-to-boost-your-retirement-income-october-01 says social security may run out in 2035

One specific reason I won’t give up Singapore citizenship is CPF, something comparable to Social Security. At age 55 I will have put aside a nest egg (perhaps 200-400k) and use it to buy an annuity plan backed by the Singapore government. It will pay out as long as I live.

In contrast, SSA doesn’t give me the confidence that they would be able to keep up with payment. With CPF, my money is never spent on someone else but SSA uses part of my money to pay low-income, disabled and other families who take more payout than they contribute. That’s the basic principle of welfare state.

— depletion of SSA reserve .. Even worse, every calendar year, the SSA pays out more than it receives. in contrast, my CPF money is always mine so it won’t pay out more than I contribute, until we consider “pooled interests”. Known as CPFLife, it is exactly like a regular annuity plan from any insurer, so the risk of “running out of money” is widely known to be small, otherwise the insurer would increase the premium and reduce the payout for new customers.

Social Security’s retirement benefits trust fund is projected to deplete reserves in 2033, leaving it reliant on current-year tax receipts covering 79% of scheduled benefits.

— other features of SSA
The Social Security tax applied to both employees and employers is 6.2% of an employee’s paycheck — or 12.4% in total. (Self-employed individuals pay the entire 12.4% themselves.)

When you contribute to Social Security, the money doesn’t go to a specific fund allocated to you: Workers are paying into a system that pays for _current_ retirees’ (not your) benefits. For every dollar you pay in, 85 cents goes towards the Social Security trust fund.

The other 15 cents goes to a separate fund that pays benefits to people with disabilities and their families. In Singapore, separate systems exists such as risk-pooling CareShield.

Unlike CPF, Payroll tax contributions are not reserved for future payouts to the particular taxpayer. In other words, the payroll taxes you contribute to the Social Security system aren’t set aside to pay your benefits when you become eligible. They fund payouts for current beneficiaries or are saved into the reserves i.e. the trust fund.

Tax .. social security is a “tax on the rich” while cpf is a compulsory savings scheme.

— health benefits
As to hospitalization insurance, IMHO the CPF-backed medisave/medishield is generally superior to the medicaid/medicare system. My main argument is again about pooling. The CPF medisave account is completely segregated by account. The shield plans are like hospitalization insurance from private insurers, but subsidized heavily by government. There’s no concern that poor families would “take” the money I contributed to a pool. In the medicare system, the rich and healthy tax payers contribute more to the pool than they withdraw, while the poor and sick members contribute less than they withdraw, according to my friend Sudhir (Mummaneni). Sudhir said even more significantly, some percentage of the population is so sick that they use up a high portion of the medicare pool.

See https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/5-of-americans-made-up-50-of-us-health-care-spending/251402/ and google “chronically ill medicare”. According to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

[1] cpf medishield is similar, but public.