Thank you Johnny for your kind words. I’ll respond to this: “taking the individual SS contribution during one’s salaried years and diverting that into private investment is every bit as sound as a government Ponzi scheme.”
In my life, I contributed 15% religiously to my 401k (counting company contribuions) and 15% to SS (counting employer contributions). At the end of my working life, I am seeing my SS as $1400/month, or about equal to a $300k annuity, while my 401k is $400k. So my investment in 401k did work out better, but not extraordinarily better. And I had the benefit of the 1990s when the stock market was soaring.
The problem with the idea of diverting the 15% we (together with our employer) put into SS into a new, interest bearing account, is that it strands the people now in SS. That’s what makes the solution to this problem (SS insolvency) so very difficult. If we could go back in time, we could fix it from the start, but we locked ourselves into this program that cannot be easily halted. If those in SS are to continue receiving their checks, we workers need to continue to pay into the system, or we need massive additional borrowing by the federal government. I can’t see any other option, and I can’t see renegging on the promises to our retirees, who paid into it for their parents decades and expect to receive the same from us.
I'll probably catch heck for this, but I can see it. If they wanted the money to be there when they retired, they should not have let Congress spend it. Effectively, they ate their cake and now want to have it, too.
BTW, when I say "they", I actually include myself.
There is, IMO, no solution. If there is, I'm pretty certain there is no "fair" one. The screwing has already occurred, now it is simply getting close to time to determine who it happened to. I think it should be the generations that could have done something to stop it, and benefited the most from the spending.
Now, I know there are a lot of folks here who did try to stop it. It would suck if we got screwed along with the rest. But again, money's gone. I don't see how we can justify shirking the burden onto the next generations.
Of course, a great deal depends on how you define "reneging on the promise". A promise made without the means to fulfill it is a fraud. Having said that, "Socialist Insecurity" can be kept solvent if we simply limit the increase to that of the actual cost of living in stead of wages. Socialist Insecurity has been going up and up and up for decades, to buy votes. Just keeping it level would keep it solvent. Worst case, we would cut it by a small percentage. Cut it only 10% and our problem is solved for decades, long enough to put a solid individual investment system in place, instead of the government Ponzi scheme that we now have.
I am very close to retiring. I would much rather have a solid 90% of what I was "promised" instead of nothing, which is what we will get if we crash the system.