There is a major flaw in your argument - a presumption that SS must exist. It doesn’t. I’m middle aged (44) and I’d gladly give up all my benefits today - if I were no longer compelled ti invest my income in a Ponzi scheme. I’d be dollars ahead.
As far as intra-governmental transfers go: Politicians from both parties have used this to hide our true deficits. If you get in the weeds and look at the ‘surplus’ years in the 90s (which both Clinton and the Gop congress take credit for), there really wasn’t a surplus....just clever parsing of words with how the accounting was done. So now here today we are really paying for government expenses that happened in the 80s and 90s....paid for by intra-governmental transfers that are now due. Just ponder for a moment how foolish it is that SS surpluses must be invested in government. Essentially taxpayers have been borrowing money from themselves, similar to borrowing from your own 401k...which most believe to be a bad idea. Why couldn’t SS invest their money in anything else...lots of safe investments outperform treasury bonds over time. More importantly, it would have prevented politicians from papering over our true deficits.
Oh well, the surplus days are over, so that ship has sailed. So I will stomp my feet. If the government siezes my benefits because I was a chump and saved for my own retirement, I still have expectations. Could the government at least run the program efficiently and hire somebody who can purge the rolls of 120 year olds, and arrest doctors who write fake ‘bipolar’ diagnosis on SS disability forms for fifty dollars a pop in the ghetto.