Three Centuries of Royal Scandals

Andrew, the royal reprobate formerly known as Prince, is the first senior member of the royal family to be arrested since Oliver Cromwell caused Charles I to get an extremely low haircut.  After the all-but-deadly-dull reign, at least morally, of the last two English monarchs, it is easy to forget that sexual scandals and assorted peccadillos are associated with almost every branch of the noble family tree. 

Let’s review:  The current royal family started about 300 years ago when Parliament ignored 50-odd closer (although Catholic) relatives of Queen Anne and imported a distant (but Protestant) German-speaking George I.  (technically, it was 312 years ago, but 300 is close enough for conversational warfare.)

George I (r.  1714–1727): “I came for the crown; I stayed for the mistress”

George I arrived from Hanover with two main hobbies: being king and not being married in any meaningful emotional sense.  His wife, Sophia Dorothea, became the star of one of the era’s grimmest “relationship outcomes”: separation, scandal, and long confinement.  

George’s marriage to Sophia Dorothea of Celle was a dynastic arrangement that curdled into open hostility.  By the early 1690s, the story goes, she’d fallen into a dangerous romance with Philip Christoph von Königsmarck, and the pair began plotting the one thing a court hates more than infidelity: escape.  Then, in early July 1694—after a late meeting in Hanover—Königsmarck vanished as neatly as a secret dropped into a river.  (Sources bicker over the exact date, but they agree on the result: Königsmarck was professionally disappeared.)

What followed was less romance novel and more administrative cruelty.  George pushed through a divorce that assigned Sophia Dorothea all the blame, stripped her of status, barred her from remarrying, and—most viciously—cut her off from her children.  She was sent into lifelong confinement at Ahlden House, effectively a “respectable” prison, where she remained until her death decades later.

If you’re keeping score, this reign sets the tone: the monarchy is now British, but the marital peace is… multinational.

George II (r.  1727–1760): “The mistress is a job, and it comes with a pension”

George II and Queen Caroline were, by royal standards, a functional partnership: she supplied the brains, the charm, and (when he wandered off to Hanover) the competent adult supervision as regent, while he supplied the temper, the uniforms, and the firm conviction that fidelity was a charming folk custom practiced by lesser people.

And yes, he kept mistresses—because in that court, a mistress wasn’t always “a scandal” so much as a semi-official office, complete with access, allies, and enemies. One of his earlier favorites, Henrietta Howard, even served in Caroline’s household, which is the sort of arrangement that makes you suspect the Georgian court ran on powdered wigs, port, and spite.

His most famous late-career “department head” was Amalie von Wallmoden, Countess of Yarmouth—a Hanoverian import who didn’t just get the king, but got a life peerage in 1740, neatly converting adultery into a title you could print on calling cards.  In a world where access was currency, that made her a gravitational body: politicians orbited, rivals hissed, and pamphleteers sharpened their quills with the usual insinuation that patronage, policy, and pillow talk all lived in the same suite of rooms.  Rumor even assigned her an illegitimate son by the king—exactly the kind of story that doesn’t need to be proven to be useful, profitable, and repeatable.

Think of it as an early form of government: the Crown, the Cabinet, and the Side Piece.

George III (r.  1760–1820): “A domestic man trapped in a family business”

George III is the palate cleanser in this menu.  He was known for being comparatively devoted to Queen Charlotte, producing an impressive number of legitimate children, and generally giving the nation fewer bedroom bulletins than it had come to expect.

His greatest “scandal,” if you must call it that, was the painful fact that the King frequently talked to trees and was barking mad.  At one point, he believed that he was George Washington leading an army against himself.  In short: less randy, more tragic, and arguably the last time Britain said, “Ah, finally, a normal one.”

George IV (r.  1820–1830): “The Regency: now with extra Regency”

If George III was the calm, George IV was the compensatory storm.  As Prince Regent, he specialized in overpriced luxury, drama, and romantic chaos.

George IV (a.k.a. “Prinny” when the knives were out) managed to turn the monarchy into a traveling show of appetite, debt, and romantic arson.  Before he was even king, he secretly married Maria Fitzherbert—an officially unacceptable match—then watched his allies publicly swat down the rumor when it became inconvenient while begging Parliament to cover his exorbitant debts.  From there he lurched into the spectacularly unhappy marriage to Caroline of Brunswick and when he wanted out, he effectively tried to weaponize Parliament of the United Kingdom into a divorce court, sparking a public circus of accusation and counteraccusation so lurid it came with paperwork.

Meanwhile, the popular press and caricaturists treated him like a walking moral lesson.  Cartoonists didn’t just draw him as bloated—they helpfully surrounded him with the sort of “medical” clutter that screamed venereal panic (the Georgian-era visual equivalent of yelling “pox!” in a crowded theatre).  And the “madness” angle wasn’t just a cheap jibe: he became Prince Regent because George III was incapacitated by severe mental illness.  By the end, the punchline turned grimly physical—corsets, dropsy, gout, and enormous doses of laudanum and opium to blunt the pain—less “divine right” than “medicated decline.”  This is the era that convinces people the monarchy is a soap opera with better furniture.

William IV (r.  1830–1837): “Ten kids, one actress, and then—surprise—respectability”

Before he became king, William IV lived for years with the actor Dorothea Jordan and had ten children with her.  Ten!  If you’ve ever wondered how royals manage “spares,” William took a… generous interpretation of the concept.

Then he became king and, like a man who suddenly realized the portrait painter had arrived, he pivoted into legitimacy and public duty.  Not exactly a scandal machine during his short reign—but the prequel season was a doozy.

Victoria (r.  1837–1901): “Make it moral, make it domestic, make it an empire”

Victoria is the monarch most associated with respectability—partly because she and Albert made a persuasive brand out of family life.  If the Georgians felt like a champagne spill, Victoria felt like a starched tablecloth.

That said, the Victorian era did have its murmurs: intense grief, intense attachments (Hello, John Brown), and a public image so carefully stage-managed that it practically invented modern monarchy PR.  If Victoria had a scandal, it was the quiet kind: feelings that were not filed in triplicate.

Edward VII (r.  1901–1910): “When your coronation follows your social calendar”

Edward VII spent most of his long apprenticeship as Prince of Wales treating the throne like a distant inheritance and London society like an all-you-can-eat buffet with a dress code. His “Marlborough House set” ran on racing, cards, weekend house parties, and adultery so routine a schedule might as well have been printed on the invitations.

In September 1890, Bertie turned up at a country-house party at Tranby Croft and did what he loved best: played baccarat, a game that was, inconveniently, technically illegal, especially when played for stakes by the glitterati.  When a guest, Sir William Gordon-Cumming, was accused of cheating, the solution was pure high-society logic: don’t investigate too hard—stage a hush deal.  Gordon-Cumming was pressured into signing a written pledge that he’d never play cards again, and the Prince of Wales obligingly signed, too, as if the heir to the throne were endorsing a royal non-disclosure agreement on a tapestry-covered card table.

Naturally, this secrecy popped like a champagne cork.  Gordon-Cumming sued, and in 1891, the heir to the throne was hauled into court as a witness—an event that generated exactly the kind of “fashionable matinée” atmosphere that screams useless monarchy.  Gordon-Cumming lost, his life was effectively socially and professionally detonated, and Bertie walked away with a fresh layer of public disgust, because nothing says “future national figurehead” like getting caught in the blast radius of a rigged secrecy pact.

This was not a man who dabbled. He acquired official mistresses with the kind of regularity with which other people acquired umbrellas. Lillie Langtry became his first publicly acknowledged mistress in the late 1870s, and society treated this as news, not a shock. Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick, later became his “official” mistress (and she was eventually replaced by Alice Keppel), as though the position came with a job description, and a handover memo.

And when the gossip columns needed a courtroom sequel, they got one: in 1870, the Prince of Wales was dragged into the Mordaunt divorce scandal, subpoenaed to testify, and forced to deny—on the record—that anything “improper” had happened. The court applauded, which is a very Victorian way of saying, “We absolutely came for the mess.”

Queen Victoria, meanwhile, regarded Bertie’s appetites as a personal affront to both morality and monarchy.  The distress caused by his affairs hit the family hard, and Victoria’s grief after Albert’s death curdled into lasting bitterness toward her heir.  She wrote, memorably, that much as she pitied him, she could not look at him “without a shudder”—which is about as close as you get to a royal parenting review in one line.

George V (r.  1910–1936): “The serious one, starring in a family of chaos”

George V is often remembered as dutiful, conventional, and sturdily monogamous—the monarchy’s answer to, “Can we please just run the country without a subplot?”

Unfortunately, the universe heard this and responded by giving him children and relatives with… plot.  Which leads us to—

Edward VIII (r.  1936): “Speedrun monarchy”

Edward VIII reigned less than a year but managed to deliver one of the biggest royal crises of the modern era: abdication to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American, in a time when that collided spectacularly with monarchy, church, and politics.  Even after his abdication, Edward managed to create new scandals, at one time plotting with Hitler to serve as puppet king in a postwar England.

This wasn’t “randy” so much as “romantic defiance with constitutional consequences.” Still, if you’re grading royal scandals on impact, this one is a platinum medal.

George VI (r.  1936–1952): “Stability, courage, and no time for nonsense”

George VI is the emergency replacement monarch who turned out to be exactly what Britain needed during WWII: steady, hardworking, and personally respectable, with a marriage that projected partnership rather than chaos.

If you’re hunting for scandal, this reign will disappoint you.  Its drama was national, not tabloid: war, duty, health, and the weight of a job he never wanted.  The juiciest thing about George VI is that he makes people feel bad for ever enjoying the gossip in the first place.  (Well, there is that story about smoking three packs of cigarettes a day resulting in having a lung removed in an operation at home…)

åElizabeth II (r.  1952–2022): “The longest reign, the largest scrapbook”

Elizabeth II’s personal life, by royal standards, was famously restrained—yet her reign became a museum of modern scandal simply because it lasted so long, and because the press got louder, faster, and more hungry.

Her “royal scandal” chapter is not so much “the Queen did what?!” but more of a series of her family’s private lives showing up on the evening news:

• family marriages cracking under public pressure,
• the media turning private misery into public sport,
• and the monarchy learning that cameras don’t blink, and tabloids don’t forgive.

If earlier monarchs had scandals as events, Elizabeth II had scandal as weather—rolling in, blowing through, and occasionally taking the roof off the gazebo.

Charles III (r.  2022– ): “The sequel nobody expected to be this complicated”

Charles III arrived on the throne with a backstory already widely known: a long, messy, very public romantic history that played out over decades, and a modern monarchy trying to look timeless while living in real time.

If you want “randy,” this reign’s reputation is mostly inherited from Charles’s years as Prince of Wales—proof that in royal life, your prequel can dominate your present.  As king, the challenge is less romance than management: family narratives, rebuilding public trust, and the small task of being a symbol in an age that distrusts symbols.

Which brings us back to Prince Andrew, who proves that selecting leaders by birth order has never once produced a slow-motion fiasco.  If your family business is literally hereditary symbolism, it’s only a matter of time before one member treats the whole operation like a private club with unlimited guest passes and no bouncer.   Andrew’s modern masterpiece was the attempt to talk his way out of trouble on television—an interview that didn’t so much “clear the air” as replace it with a thick, lingering fog of disbelief—followed by the palace doing what it does best: removing uniforms, patronages, and public duties in the calm, administrative tone usually reserved for reassigning a problematic office printer.

And then the plot did what royal plots always do: it escalated.  Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested.  If the Georgians gave us mistresses with titles and the Edwardians gave us baccarat in the drawing room, the 21st century gives us the inevitable endpoint of a system that foolishly breeds for primogeniture instead of judgment: not scandal as naughty gossip, but scandal as paperwork, police statements, and the monarchy discovering—again—that “born to it” is not the same thing as “good at it.”

The Surrender of Fort Fillmore

Perhaps the first thing you should know about this little-known Civil War episode is that the geography is the villain of the story—or, at least, a co-conspirator.  People love to imagine Civil War battles as neat little arrows on a tidy map.  Down here in the Mesilla Valley, the map itself has been wandering around like a drunken steer.  The mountains behave; the river does not.

And then there’s the border.  When Fort Fillmore’s drama unfolds in July 1861, the “southern New Mexico” you know today is still the new wing of the house—added via the Gadsden Purchase in 1853–1854, which means the international boundary everyone takes for granted had been settled, locally, for only about seven years.  That short timeline helps explain why some old maps look a bit… aspirational.

In 1848, the little community that became Mesilla was established west of the Rio Grande (and along El Camino Real).  But the Rio Grande is famous for behaving like a living thing—shifting, braiding, cutting new channels during big floods, and (at times) flipping what people think of as the “east bank” and “west bank.”  One technical summary of the 1860s flooding notes the river cut a new course that left Mesilla on the river’s east bank, and other local histories point out yet another course change later that helped produce the river’s present-day position.

That’s why old descriptions can sound like they’re contradicting one another when they’re actually describing different decades of a restless river.

Now, about Fort Fillmore, itself: if you’re picturing towering stockade walls and a gate you could drive a stagecoach through—nope.  Fort Fillmore was a typical southern New Mexico “fort”: a cluster of adobe buildings, arranged around a central space, with one side open toward the Rio Grande.  A visitor in the 1850s even described it as “large and pleasant,” with comfortable adobe quarters.

Fort Fillmore was established in 1851, across the Rio Grande from La Mesilla to protect travel and traffic through a corridor that connected settlements, trails, and commerce, and that also drew Apache raids and other violence common to the era.

So, keep that mental image in mind: Fort Fillmore was not a compact stone castle, but crude adobe structures in open desert country that was surrounded by nothing but tumbleweeds—hardly an ideal place to absorb a determined attack, especially from mounted men who could choose their angles of attack.  This was a fort that you could demolish with a good garden hose much less a howitzer.

This may sound like the punchline to a bad joke, but it’s mostly a story about risk management.

Fort Fillmore was not built near the river, but on sand hills above it—a choice that made sense if you feared floods and wanted slightly higher, drier ground.  The problem is that a river that shifts can turn “near” into “not near” with alarming speed.  One widely repeated summary notes that after the Rio Grande changed course, the fort ended up being about a mile from the river and had to be supplied by water wagons, which, in turn, made it harder to defend in a crisis.

In other words: it wasn’t built where there was no water so much as it was built where water was close enough—until it wasn’t.

When the Civil War begins, the U.S. Army in the far Southwest is thinly spread, and everything is held together with small detachments, long supply lines, and optimism.  In July 1861, Confederate forces from Texas under Lt.  Col.  John R.  Baylor move into the Mesilla area.  Baylor’s men are mounted, aggressive, and comfortable in desert campaigning.

At Fort Fillmore, the Union commander is Major Isaac Lynde, with several companies of infantry regulars and attached elements—enough to look respectable on paper, but not enough to feel secure when you’re staring at mounted opponents, on a jittery frontier, and insecure in the knowledge that your supply lines have been cut and that the rest of the nation’s attention is a thousand miles away.

Lynde marches out toward Mesilla, where Baylor’s men are positioned.  The confrontation becomes what you might call a “confidence test,” and Lynde does not pass it, despite having more soldiers than the Confederate force.  After a short fight kills three union soldiers, Lynde falls back to Fort Fillmore.  This small battle is known as the First Battle of Mesilla.  (There was a second battle about a year later, but it was so small that no one is sure exactly when it happened.)

This is the hinge point: once he returns to the post, Lynde has a decision.  He can try to defend his mud fort or abandon it and try to save his command by moving north towards another Union fort.  It was not much of a choice, so Lynde orders the soldiers to prepare to abandon the fort.

Now here’s where the story gets a little hazy.  As part of the preparation to leave, Lynde orders that all of the fort’s stores that couldn’t be evacuated are to be destroyed.  Whether the fort had a large stock of medicinal brandy or the Sutler’s store was oversupplied with whiskey is a mystery.  What is known is that many of the soldiers decide that the best way to destroy the liquor is to run it through their systems.  Many of the soldiers choose to fill their canteens with whiskey. 

Perhaps they were worried about snake bite?  As W. C. Fields said, “Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snake bite.  Always carry a snake in case of thirst.”

Lynde wants an orderly retreat, leaving the Mesilla area and heading east into the Organ Mountains and the only source of reliable water nearby—the springs in the San Augustin Pass, about 20 miles distant.  From there, they could move north towards Fort Union. 

That was the plan.  In practice, it turns into a slow-motion collapse.  Men fall out, heat punishes them, the column straggles, and the mounted Confederates enjoy the luxury of mounted pursuit while the infantry fights the desert as much as any enemy.  Southern New Mexico in July is as hot as a pawn shop pistol.  The heat is stifling even in the shade and there ain’t no shade.  In the middle of a New Mexico summer, I’ve seen trees chase dogs in hope of relief.

Baylor splits his forces, sending half through a narrow mountain pass that now bears his name.  While his men are mounted, Lynde’s troops are on foot, struggling in the heat and are beginning to suffer from the effects of their canteens.

By the time Baylor closes in near the San Augustin Pass/San Augustin Springs area, Lynde’s command is demoralized and scattered enough that the surrender becomes, in Lynde’s mind, the least-bad way to avoid slaughter.  He surrenders without a climactic last stand. 

Baylor plays this well.  He pressures, pursues, and presents Lynde with the sense that resistance will only mean pointless casualties.  Lynde yields.  Baylor has captured a Union force in spectacular fashion, and the Confederacy suddenly has a foothold in the region strong enough for Baylor to proclaim a Confederate “Arizona” government soon after, with Mesilla as its capital. 

Lynde’s surrender detonates his career.  He is disgraced, and the Army moves harshly against him.  A War Department order drops him from the rolls “for cowardice,” effective the date of the surrender. 

Baylor rides his victory into power.  His proclamation and early Confederate control in the region make him briefly prominent.  But Baylor’s story also curdles.  He is removed from authority later after issuing an infamous order calling for the extermination of the Apache people—an act so extreme that even Confederate leadership moved against him. 

Today, Fort Fillmore is not only forgotten, but it has almost completely vanished. Where the fort once stood is a large pecan orchard where the grounds have been expertly leveled to conserve the precious irrigation water.  All that is left is the fort cemetery, located about half a mile southeast.

We need some way to commemorate this battle.  Since commemorative runs and walks are the national hobby now, let’s do what any responsible civilization would do: every July, we should stage an annual Fort Fillmore Whiskey Run.

Participants will begin with the traditional gesture—all water bottles will be confiscated and replaced with a pint of whiskey—then participants will set off to recreate Lynde’s finest hour: twenty miles of ambitious decision-making through the desert and march up into the Organ Mountains.  Finishers will be rewarded with access to the springs, which is a lovely touch of historical authenticity, except for the small complication that the springs inconveniently dried up around 1950.  Still, details, details.  History is built on them and is then immediately trampled by them.

A Look Back at the Bush Plan

Every few years, someone drags Social Security out onto the national stage, shines a harsh spotlight on it, and announces—usually with the calm confidence of a man explaining compound interest to a golden retriever—that what the program really needs is a makeover involving Wall Street.

In the mid-2000s, President Bush floated the idea of “personal accounts,” and the discussion quickly collapsed into a familiar shouting match:

• Republicans heard, “You can own your retirement!”
• Democrats heard, “They’re going to turn Grandma’s check into a day-trading app!”

The partisan rhetoric doomed the proposed plan before it had any chance to be seriously studied or modeled.  In the last two decades there has been no serious discussion about changing the Social Security system even though we all know it has serious problems.

It is roughly 17 years since the Bush Plan would have been in effect, so let’s do something unfashionable: let’s assume everyone remains calm, lower the volume, and walk through what the proposal actually meant, what it would have meant financially, and what it might mean for the average retiree today if the diverted money had been invested in a plain-vanilla S&P 500 index fund.

This is a blog, not a dissertation, so I’m going to keep the math honest, but not joyless.  So, what was the plan?

The popular memory is that Bush wanted to “privatize half” of Social Security.  The most concrete version of the plan that got widely modeled wasn’t “half.”  It was more like: “You may divert a small slice.”

In the most widely analyzed design, the personal account would be funded by diverting up to 4% of the payroll tax, subject to a dollar cap that started at around $1,000 a year and rose over time.  In other words, it was a limited diversion and not a full-blown transfer of the whole program into your Fidelity login.

That detail matters, because it means the personal account was never going to grow into a yacht for the “average” worker… More like a modest financial dinghy—possibly a very nice dinghy—depending on the ocean.

This is an important detail: Your Social Security check goes down if you opt in.  That’s the part that gets lost in the political bumper-sticker version.  If you divert payroll taxes into a personal account, your traditional Social Security benefit gets reduced.  Not because the government is being mean, but because you didn’t pay those taxes into the system, so you don’t get paid as if you did.

The personal account in our model is that all the funds diverted go into an S&P Index Fund that grows or declines with the stock market.  At your retirement, your personal account pays you something too, and your total retirement income becomes:

    (Smaller Social Security check) + (Personal account payment) = Total

So, yes, your Social Security check would be smaller.  The question is whether the personal account would make up the difference, and then some.

Now, the big hypothetical: What if the personal account was invested in an S&P 500 index fund?

The scenario we’re using

• We’re looking at a new retiree in 2026 (turning 65 and retiring around now) who earned an average income each year.
• They opted into the personal account in 2009 and contributed the maximum allowed each year under the capped design.
• The money was invested in a low-cost S&P 500 index fund, with a small annual fee assumption (think “boring and responsible,” not “crypto enthusiast at 2:00 a.m.”).

What happens to the monthly Social Security check?

Under this scenario, the offset would reduce the retiree’s monthly Social Security check by about:

• $276 to $284 per month (in today’s dollars)

So, if someone says, “Privatization would raise your Social Security check,” the polite reply is: No.  It lowers the check, and then adds a second check.

What does the personal account pay per month?

Under the same scenario, the personal account would generate about:

• $530 to $593 per month (in today’s dollars)

This is where the stock market does its dramatic entrance, wearing sequins.

Net result: total monthly retirement income.  Put the two together:

• Social Security check goes down: –$276 to –$284
•  Personal account adds income: +$530 to +$593
•  Net change: +$255 to +$309 per month

So, in this specific “average new retiree in 2026” scenario, the retiree’s total monthly income would likely be higher than under current law—by a few hundred dollars a month.  And remember, this is what would happen if we diverted only a small portion of the funds into the private sector.

That’s real money.  It’s not a second home in Aspen, but it’s also not “nothing.”

But wait: does that mean the plan “solves” Social Security?  No, and this is where the policy conversation gets slippery.  The trust fund problem doesn’t vanish; it shape-shifts.

Social Security’s financing challenge is largely a question of cash flow: payroll taxes come in, benefits go out, and demographics are doing what demographics always do—namely, refusing to ask permission as they run roughshod over your plans.

If you divert payroll taxes into personal accounts, the trust funds receive less money up front.  But retirees still need to be paid their benefits during the transition.  That creates transition costs.  In normal-person terms, it means:

The government either:

• borrows,
•  raises other taxes,
•  cuts benefits,
•  or it does some mixture of all three,

to keep sending checks while part of the payroll tax stream is being rerouted.  The original Bush plan was to divert funds from the general fund into Social Security to match what was being diverted.  If this wasn’t done, the Social Security trust fund would be in worse financial shape than it currently is.  If Congress fails to divert funds, the trust fund, already in terrible financial shape, gets worse.

Could the long-term picture improve if the offset is structured a certain way, participation is limited, benefit growth is changed, or additional financing is added?  Yes.  But personal accounts by themselves are not a magic wand that makes arithmetic stop being arithmetic.

The inheritance question: What could the average retiree leave to heirs?

Here’s where personal accounts do something traditional Social Security generally does not: they can create a pile of money with your name on it.  Under the present system, if a retiree dies after receiving benefits for only one month, his family receives a one-time death benefit of $255.  The rest of the money the retiree paid into the system vanishes.

Under the same scenario, the personal account at retirement would be about:

• $95,000 to $106,000 (in today’s dollars)

Since this money is in a private account, the total funds would be available to the retiree’s family upon the death of the retiree if the retiree opted to only receive the interest off the fund and not spend the principle.

In other words, personal accounts introduce a new freedom: you can choose a higher monthly income now, or a larger bequest later.  Social Security, as designed, is much more “lifetime insurance” than “inheritable asset.”

So, was the Bush plan a good idea?

The honest blog answer is: it depends on what you’re optimizing for, and how lucky you get.

Potential upside:

• A strong market period could boost total retirement income for average retirees.
•  Personal accounts can create inheritable wealth, especially for people who die earlier, or who don’t spend down the account.
•  People like owning things with their name on them.  This is not a trivial political fact.

Potential downside:

• Market risk becomes retirement risk.  If the market does badly during your contribution years, or right before retirement, your “private” portion shrinks, but the offset doesn’t sympathetically shrink at the same pace.
•  The transition financing is real, and it can increase federal borrowing pressures in the years it matters most politically (which is to say, all years ending in a number).

The takeaway, in plain English.  If an average new retiree in 2026 had been allowed to divert the maximum under the capped design, and that money had tracked an S&P 500 index fund through the 2009–2025 market run, then:

• Their Social Security check would likely be about $280/month smaller,
•  Their personal account would likely add about $560/month,
•  Their total monthly income would likely be about $255–$309/month higher, and
•  They might have something like $95,000 to $106,000 in “surplus” account value that could be preserved for heirs, if they didn’t spend it.

That’s the sunny version, because the stock market in that period was, frankly, in a good mood.  The darker version is the one nobody can calculate cleanly ahead of time: what happens when the market is not in a good mood, but you are still trying to pay rent.

And that, right there, is why this debate never dies: it’s a tug-of-war between the appeal of ownership, the comfort of insurance, and the unavoidable fact that the future is going to do whatever it wants, regardless of our spreadsheets.