Nice rant but have no idea what you are talking about? I will guarantee you one thing, those who want to be offended will be.
Let's try again. You are perfectly free to ask me to break the cycle by depending only on my savings, which you did here.
Now is the time for the Baby Boomers to solve this problem for both their parents and future generations and truly become the selfless generation.
And
The most effective method would be to voluntarily not take the benefits and decide to work the rest of your life and leave your benefits unclaimed...
Ayn Rand had a term for those insisting that other people be altruistic, and it wasn't a polite one. Nevertheless, I'm willing to go along because as you pointed out, the numbers really don't give us much choice. That would be here:
When we are borrowing from our children 40% of the nearly 4 Trillion dollars in the budget and we have a program that uses 35% of it we can never be serious about balancing it.
I quite concur. Nevertheless, this really needs a second look:
Men who work well into their sixties and seventies have more reward and are in generally better health than those who are retired and lead a sedentary life. They are also more financially secure since they are in the primes of their earnings career. This is the time they can become entrepreneurs which can make them more financially successful so they can leave more to their dependents and family they have left behind.
Work is good for me, got it, unless of course it kills me, which it could. I'm not actually in the "prime" of my earnings career because other, younger people are being hired into the same job and paid more. That's a fact of life when you're 60. Now, I really love this one - it's simple, really, I just become an entrepreneur and get rich. Why didn't I think of that? There is, of course, the matter of venture capital and I have just decreased my future income prospects by eschewing SS, but no matter, it's easy! Well, no. Here's a hard fact of economic life: most entrepreneurs go broke.
I think it boils down to this, and pardon me if I didn't express it clearly: asking other people to make a sacrifice for the benefit of others should not be treated this cavalierly. My point is that those others don't seem to be particularly eager to make any sacrifices for me. That's fine, and I can accept the fact that my loss is probably going to be less than asking my successors to contribute 40, 50, 60% of their salaries to prolong the game. But they have to play their part by acknowledging that this is a sacrifice and not making it any more difficult than it already will be. That means not building another Ponzi scheme of ever-increasing entitlements. I'll be a lot happier about the whole thing if I see that happen, but it isn't, and I'm not.