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The current crop of Republican robbers, led by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI 1), with the backing of exclusively self-interested libertarians and objectivists, intend to destroy the Social Security system, through a privatization scheme that guarantees nothing to anyone with the possible exception of the Wall Street thieves who would be skimming their share as administrators of the plan while arrogating the rest of it to themselves with market manipulations. With that accomplished in order to avoid paying back what is owed to the system, it would turn Ronald Reagan's "borrowing" into the outright theft of this or any other century, misappropriating those trillions of payroll tax dollars to purposes for which they were not intended.
The less palatable option at their disposal is to default on those obligations, destroying the faith and credit of the United States and triggering the worst worldwide financial panic in history. The reason that they would prefer to avoid that last option is that when that happened, their transnational corporate masters would not be getting paid either, and that, after all, along with several foreign held sovereign wealth funds, is who is holding most of the debt owed by the United States.
With the current surplus, the trust funds will remain solvent for a minimum of twenty-seven more years, with that result being calculated on the assumption that the United States economy will spend that entire time in its current dismal state. There are, however, measures to be taken to extend that period for an indefinitely long time into the future.
As it stands, the top fifty percent of wage earners enjoy a greater and diverging life expectancy at the time of retirement over the bottom half of wage earners. With payroll tax caps in place for salaries above $109,000, this sets up a situation where the bottom half of wage earners are subsidizing to an unwarranted degree the benefits paid to the longer lived top half of retired wage earners. That is a clear justification for the removal of payroll tax caps. This may be accomplished with the wage earners alone paying the increase, sparing their employers from matching it.
Regarding the American People viewing Social Security as funding "a long and enjoyable retirement", perhaps you would do well to consult some American retirees who depend exclusively on Social Security to provide their fixed income. You might be swayed to a more realistic view.
In any event, a fanciful tissue of lies informs the self-serving libertarian view of the Social Security system and its problems. Perhaps, someday, libertarians will provide themselves with facts in this or any other issue, but, of course, that would end their careers as libertarians.
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