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My suggestions, complete with offsets below. It's not ideal, but might be generally acceptable to left and right. It's a terrible thing to have to correct this mess, but someone needs to do it. And it must be done with ONE overriding objective: allowing people to create their own wealth and future. When the Founders said "freedom" - they meant we were to be free to be prosperous through productivity and thrift, but they never meant we were to be guaranteed freedom from want.

1. Freeze congressional salaries and benefits, as well as staff size for the next 10 years.
2. Keep the promise to seniors for SS payments who are on it now, and those who are 50 or older as of 1/1/04 and want to be a part of this bad investment.
3. Exempt folks in category #2 above who have a current net worth of over $1M. They must continue to pay (if working) taxes into the system, but they will never see any of it in benefits.
4. Allow singles still in the SS scheme to elect a beneficiary to receive (in one non-taxable lump sum) exactly what they put into the system if the taxpayer dies before they are eligible to receive benefits.
5. Raise eligibility age to 67.
4. Allow those under 50 as of 1/1/04 to extract themselves completely, requiring them to place the equivalent amount (pre-tax) of what they would have paid in SS taxes into any sound investment instrument of their choosing via direct deposit or other transfer.

My suggestions, complete with offsets below.

Not bad. I'd recommend some sort of sliding scale so you don't have a hard cutoff at 50, something like:
- Those under 30 (which includes me) will receive no benefits. No great loss as polls show most of us never expect to receive them anyway.
- Those between 30 and 50 will receive a percentage of the (fraudulently) promised benefits, e.g. a 35 year old would receive 25%, a 45 year old would receive 75%, and so forth.

But those are just details. Social Security has resulted in a staggering debt in the form of promises to retirees and current workers (some of which can be broken, but much of which can't), and we must fix it as soon as possible. It gets worse every day we delay.