To cover the system’s cash drains, the government will have to, in some combination, raise taxes, borrow more, or reduce benefits, year after year after year.
You forgot one other possibility, massive inflation of our currently. That’s where all of this is heading: trillion-dollar stimulus packages, artificially low interest rates, budget deficits and increases in spending without corresponding increases in taxes, tons of business and consumer debt, and now a fixed annuity owed by the government.
Hyperinflation is how SS, and alot of other things in our economy gets “fixed”; our currency collapses in value, but the payments out of Social Security remain the same dollar value. Of course, the world economy as we know it would be trashed, and who knows what would rise out of its ashes.
My hope is that, out of this mess, some private barter currency would arise the value and quantity of which fundamentally couldn’t be controlled by any government. That we would see a “separation of capital and state” so to speak, and a resulting weakening of state power that would be the dawning of a new libertarian age. A man can dream . . . .
