It was designed to keep elderly people from dieing in the streets from exposure and starvation which is what was happening prior to its inception. It’s primary purpose was to be a social safety net but it eventually became an indirect extension of the general tax fund. The underlying problem with social security is unemployment and underemployment which have led to decreased economic growth. This decreased employment/revenue/growth coupled with the inflationary nature of fractional reserve banking/federal reserve banking has formed something of a perfect storm; however, regardless of the government’s capital mismanagement, I have been paying into social security for over 20 years and the government owes me some money (me and millions of other Americans). This is not an entitlement, it’s more of a contract and this is, of course, what makes social security the third rail of politics.
I have been paying into it for 35 years. I doubt I will ever see any of what I paid into it. I don’t think the under-employment/unemployment now is the underlying problem, it just exacerbated the already rotten situation and is causing it to go broke a few years sooner than it would have anyways. I have been hearing some politicians warn since the 1980s that SS was going to go broke sometime around 2020 or 2030. I don’t know how many elderly died in the streets in the 150 years of US history before SS, but I believe that was probably not the norm back in those days. I also do not think that SS was started with good intentions to help the “little guy”, it was started by FDR to lock voters into voting ‘rat. FDR and the other politicians from the 1930s up to now all knew that they could abuse the SS system as much as they wanted and as long as it lasted until they were out of office or dead, they did not care. SS was just a clever vehicle politicians have used to raise tax revenue to spend on other stuff that they never could get under any other pretense. Demographics kept it looking healthy for years but now that the first boomers are retiring, the whole program is clearly unsustainable and something has to be done or it will just go broke in a few years. I have thought it was a scam for as long as I can remember and if I had a choice I would never have put a penny into it.