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I must confess that the connection (inflation and inflating the money supply on the sly) is both logical and anecdotal.

Aside: there were other things going on in the 70s that contributed ... such as how WW2 had left us with an intact, largely new but in many cases not current — under government influence they often favored tried and true over new industrial tech — industrial base that had to soon compete with industries rebuilding from the rubble up with the best innovations to come out of the war, the upshot being that ordinary economic attrition was out of phase, and to some degree still is, so that back and forth of our economy vs others gaining ground and waning is influenced by this. As for the 70s, the costs of growing the social welfare state with fighting the Cold War gobbled up available credit and caused a lot of industry to have to choose between paying more in interest to upgrade or soldiering on with old equipment. Toss on the Muslim oil producers feeling their oats and other concurrent phenomenon and the inflation of the money supply I’d mentioned becomes just one aspect. Though one I’d argue has been neglected.

The fact that Congress had always spent the Social Security surplus and they pretended it was still there through accounting deceptions is why I say that SS was really about having money to spend, raising taxes under a pretense.

Early ideas of SS did feature actually investing the money but FDR etc raised fears of the instability of the market, just as people to this day raise fears of the instability of the market. However that is inherently dishonest for this reason: when stocks fail the worst you are left with is nothing ... that’s the worst case scenario; but when the government spends the money and issues an unsecured promise to repay out of future tax receipts that is by definition less than nothing when it comes to the future of any program, a pure liability, and that covers the best case scenario as well as the worst

The stock market has not ever completely collapsed, the worst case scenario for private investment hasn’t happened. But even if it had “nothing” is always better than “less than nothing” because at least in that worst case scenario you aren’t left holding a bag of debts.

Now, an honest criticism of the investment route is one I doubt you’d ever hear a politician, and certainly not a modern Democrat, ever make because they are essentially addicted to not just their power but being able to enrich themselves (which is why insider trading has been lawful for them, among other things). This criticism is that by making the federal government an investor with the sheer quantity of swag that will be involved, you make it a final arbitrator of winners and losers in the market as well as let Congresscritters direct investment to firms they are invested in.

Government in the markets is a Bubble Making Machine, no less than government in insuring banks has become, and is an artisan spring of corruption.

So government retirement programs are bad no matter how you go: there is no way they’ll sit on a pile of cash (which is not feasible anyway without a specie backed Money) and the options are then between endless unsecured debt as politicians use the proceeds to buy their jobs or endless corruption as they manipulate the markets to their personal advantage.

And that ignores the basic problem of all these mad schemes of social weal with training people to look to the government to take care of them in ways most of us could take care of ourselves.