Doesn’t SS go to new immigrants, with less work required for a full payout? Also, can’t an immigrant bring in family members who are elderly, and get coverage?
If we kept to the original plan of an individual worker building up a lockbox fund plus interest, we would not be here. “Someone” turned it into an “entitlement” scam.
Sorry, the original plan was a scam from the start.
Payments to retirees always depended upon taxes on the earnings of current workers. The idea was that the number of current workers would continue to expand over the years. The post WWII baby boom encouraged the belief that benefit payouts could be periodically increased. The decline in the birth rate makes the scheme untenable. On top of this, Social Security was merged into the total budget a few decades back. This permitted the government to borrow from the Social Security Trust Fund to pay for other expenditures. The recent recession has merely accelerated the inevitable insolvency of the system.