"As much fun as it is to kick around the Boomers, we gotta move past it. Generational politics is a dead-end. Fuck it, someone slap the shit out of me if I ever say the word “Millennial’ after this. Because once we’ve set up this economic collapse as nothing more than generational warfare, we’re already lost–we’ve created a narrative which the wealthy can easily co-opt and spin for their own fiendish ends.

So keep your eyes on the prize, Millennials: it’s capitalism that’s the problem. Not the grey-hairs."

Turns out that the Ponzi scheme that is today's Social Security system was actually NOT envisioned that way by FDR, and in fact he fought attempts to make it thus. It wasn't until the 50's that it was changed from a savings system to the pay-as-you-go.

Social Security has a funding shortfall too—about 0.8% of GDP over the 75-year horizon. That’s just about equal to the revenue from the expiration of the high-end Bush tax cuts, and less than half from all the Bush cuts. So please don’t tell me we can’t afford this guaranteed pension that provides more than half of their income to more than half of the elderly.

The best way to make the size of the projected Social Security shortfall understandable is to put it in context. Relative to the size of the economy, the projected Social Security shortfall is equal to 0.7 percent of GDP. By comparison, annual spending on the military increased by more than 1.6 percentage points of GDP between 2000 and 2011. So the burden imposed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are almost 2.5 times larger than the money that would be needed to eliminate the Social Security shortfall.”

This is the great thing about Social Security from a policy point of view: it's pretty easy. It's fundamentally a pure accounting exercise. By 20301, the income-outgo gap is about 1.5% of GDP, so all you have to do is pick and choose from a menu of options that gradually raise revenue and cut benefits by a combined total of 1.5% of GDP. That's it. Your choices will depend a lot on your values and your priorities, but in the end the only thing you have to do is make sure the numbers add up. Simple.

POSTSCRIPT: Go ahead! Give it a try! This CBO report lists 30 options for you to choose from (summarized in Table 2 on page 33). They use the 75-year gap as their unit of account, rather than the annual gap, which they peg at 0.6% of GDP. So pick a basket of options that adds up to 0.6% and you've fixed Social Security. Congratulations!

1Actually, the trust fund makes up for the gap between 2015 and about 2040. So you only really need to close the gap after that. But eventually you have to come up with about 1.5% of GDP.

But it’s pretty amazing that 44.1 percent of Social Security beneficiaries seem to have convinced themselves that the single largest government social program—a program that consists of the government mailing checks to people—is not a government social program.

Which is to say, actual small government conservatism -- as opposed to opposition to unspecified waste or a misunderstanding of the size of the foreign aid budget -- is essentially nonexistent at the popular level

"Social Security’s 75-year shortfall is manageable. In fact, it’d be almost completely erased by applying the payroll tax to income over $106,000. Source (PDF)."

The key thing to remember, always, is what the federal government does: it is basically an insurance company for old people that also has an army. 

There are many contexts in which Americans may be required or expected to share the Social Security Numbers (SSNs). What are the security issues around the use of your SSN as an indentifier?