If you think SS has produced "real value" then we have a different definition of real value.
I am still opposed to it.
And many still are.
The FICA has been near death many times and been resurrected by adding in groups that had previously not been part of the system; By increasing the tax rate and by raising the age at which you can collect at the full rate.
The system was a con job on the tax payer from the beginning.
It was set up so that most men (most workers at the time were men) would die before they could ever collect benefits and their wives would only collect a few years before they died. Other than wives or dependent children there was no survivor’s benefit (other than a small burial allowance). If you died before you started collecting benefits with no wife and no dependent children, the government walked away with all of your ‘contributions’ scot free. You can not will your benefits to anyone. This is still true.
The vaunted trust fund is a complete fiction and always was.
The Trust Fund was organized so that Excess contributions to the SS would be used to purchase Special Federal Securities. These securities would not be tradable as are normal securities. They would only be redeemable to the US Treasury.
Put more simply SS was designed to bring in more money to the treasury than it cost to run the system. It was designed so that the average person in the system would die long before he got his money back out of the system.
But as usual with government socialist program eventually they fail. Medical progress succeeded in making people live longer. Too long for the SS system to continue unchanged. Not to mention politicians can never leave well enough alone and meddling with SS was just too big a temptation to resist. Benefits were added from time to time that boosted the cost.
Long story made short; Social Security is running in the Red today. It is cashing in the bonds in the ‘Trust Fund’ which in reality means that ‘Quantitative Easing’ is paying for SS benefits paid out today.
Some people in government, Hilary Clinton for one, has advocated confiscation of 401K accounts to shore up Social Security. That should tell you what a great success Social Security is today.
I myself am about 5 years away from collecting SS. I would not be at all surprised if the system collapses before I can collect. Or at least the system faces some drastic changes.
Maybe they will raise the minimum age requirement to 70. It has been suggested many times in the past, going back to G W Bush’s first term when he tried to get legislation passed to phase out the system.