I was promised
Quite simply, the govt had no business "promising" a retirement & medical coverage for every person over 65 no matter what their means with no plan to address longevity, cost, or burden placed on an ever decreasing ratio of working participants. If you really think the govt owes you something just because they made a misguided promise following one of the greatest periods of financial uncertainty in at least the last century, we are just going to have to agree to disagree.
This doesn't mean that privatization is anything more than a thinly veiled poison pill with the real intent of forcing an end to a program for those who truly need it as well as those who don't. That doesn't mean that social security, in some artificial budgetary isolation, isn't solvent for the foreseeable future. That also doesn't mean that a budget consumed by medicare/medicade entitlements will be able to afford any entitlements at all including SS. That also, finally, doesn't mean that, even if we could afford all these entitlements, that we should provide them to those people who can easily work and/or live comfortably off of their own savings by taxing the ever dwindling ratio of those who still work.
Today's entitlement system is a well intentioned, but very broken & underfunded system that will likely never be fixed until it is too late to save any part of it including SS. Short sighted, and easily manipulated, voters will simply continue to vote in more entitlements, greater tax cuts, and scream, holler, and stamp their feet about what "promises" they feel the govt owes them until the economy collapses under the weight of ever increasing demands, debt & currency debasement.
The greatest threats to free, wealthy, nations is the hubris of foreign military interventionalism, and the creeping "promises" of bloated entitlements ... in that order.
US Dollar (X Axis) vs Brazilian Real (Y Axis)
