If you were born on or after 1960, your retirement age has already been raised to 67. This is effectively a benefit cut. Also, anyone born on or after 1960 has already had their taxes doubled for their entire working life. Carter and Clinton both passed huge ss tax increases. So those of us born after 1960 have already had our benefits cut and our taxes hiked. Any new cuts should be only AND I MEAN ONLY on those born before 1960. Figure it out somehow. The oldsters are spending our money. Let us choose to put our money in personal savings accounts, and no one from here on out should be getting any ss money unless they have the same rules that we have, retroactive taxes due and reduced benefits to reflect increased retirement age. Finally, consider this, without personal accounts, every few years congress inches up our retirement age and raises taxes to "fix" social security. By the time we get to be 65, retirement age will be 75 and we will be paying 50% of our income to social security.
My goodness, that sounds like a typical liberal mantra - "I want mine, so take someone else's to make sure I get mine."
I guess that being born before 1960 makes me a little more sensitive; why should those who paid the longest, and planned their retirement out, have the rug yanked from under them when they have no chance to make other plans, while the younger ones have more time to try to do things for themselves? I woke up in my early 30s and started to plan ahead by doing some minor investing. It isn't much, but it was needed to supplement the little that Social Security will provide. It would seem that the younger generation has even more reason to start doing for themselves at an earlier age. Unless, of course, they have all fallen into the nanny-state trap and expect the government to keep doing more and more for them. The younger you are, the more you should want a total reform, but that needn't include robbing those that have already paid their dues.
Of course, you realize that if your plan were put into effect, there would be no reason to think that a few years down the road someone else might come up with the same idea, only with your age group as the target for the cuts. After all, unless something is done to fix things, later generations will be paying even more with less expectations of return.