"I suspect the AARP leadership will fight tooth and nail against fixing what member$ perceive is not broken."
It's not a broken system if you only paid a FICA tax rate of one percent and get to draw benefits at todays levels.
Now later generations will be getting screwed since they pay a FICA tax that has been raised thirteen times and is 500% higher. What we have here is "Age Warfare".
The true culprit in all this is the politicians that spent the money from the "Trust fund". It's no different than a CEO stealing from his employees pension fund.
Very true, indeed! However, in part it is also now down to simple mathmatics - ratio. That is, the shrinking number of supporting payers versus the number of growing beneficiaries.
But your point is well taken, if a CEO similarly stole all the employee's pension funds to pay for ongoing business expenses he would be in jail for a long, long time. But apparently politicials (and Union bosses) are not bound by this same legal and moral edict.
We baby boomers had to pay higher taxes to pay for our parents' Social Security benefits and I was damn happy to do it for that generation. Now the baby boomers have to be paid for so raise FICA if and only if we need to. We paid for our parents, now it's our children's burden.
And (Wristpin, this is not directed at you) talk by some here about "old geezers that didn't plan for their future" no doubt comes from some extremely spoiled brats that were very poorly raised and never taken out of diapers. They have absolutely no respect for anyone older than them. I really wish someone would change their diapers so their disposition gets better and then restrict them from their computer so they will quit embarrassing their parents and bringing into focus their parents' lack of parenting skills. If they want to act like spoiled brat, poorly raised children then they should be treated as such.
I have NO pity, no sympathy, NO ideological problem with raising taxes so that our children have to pay for our Social Security. And, you know why? Because we are the parents and they are the children. The Bible says to respect your father and mother and God was dead serious about that.
Eventually the baby boomers will die off just as the WWII generation is for the most part gone. FICA taxes will have to go down anyway because there will be many less potential recipients than there are in the Baby Boomer generation. That is unless the spoiled brat generation X people don't demand much higher benefits from Social Security than their parents and grandparents received. Don't think that won't happen because they are the Spoiled Rotten Generation.