Which it *can't* do, Gary. The metaphorical "iceberg" will tip over, with recipients outnumbering payers in the not-too-distant future. Having spent the trust-fund already, the government will have no option but to change the program. This horse has already left the barn.

Gary the Socialist: "if anything it is becoming into what it was orginal (sic) meant to be not just the oppiste (sic) as you say."

How do you figure, Gary? The program was designed and intended as a supplementary savings program for blue-collar workers. Of course, this was in an era when there were many more contributors than recipients. How is forcing millions of more payers never intended to be part of the program "becoming into what it was orginal (sic) meant to be."

The program has become a Ponzi scheme — a fraud where current recipients are paid off by current payers. I'm fairly certain, having read the authorizing Act, that a fraud wasn't what the "orginal (sic) meant to be."

Gary: "we all know that our goverment (sic) is a trillion in debth (sic) each year now and would be another half a billion more if not for SS1."

SSI, not SS1. Short for "Social Security Insurance."

Second, your mathematical ability rivals your spelling. The debt that that the government, all of their accounting chicanery aside, is still a debt, so there has been no prevention of debt by plundering SSI.

Gary: "So please tell what age would you cut benifits (sic) and how you with decades of statiscal (sic) facts at your disposel (sic) would redo private SS2 so it does not become as you say another poorly designed one."

To do that, I'd have to drag you from middle-school mathematics through at least college level algebra and Calculus for business majors. I have better things to do with my time than try to correct your errors in juedgement.

Like your education, I fear it may be too late for a SSI fix, Gary. As a matter of fact, I have prepared my finances under the assumption that the rotten barn that is SSI will collapse long before I come of an age to collect. Of course, liberals are floating notions of undoing that by confiscating 401K programs, with IRA's being likely the next source of private income for the government to plunder, so my hard work and sacrifice to secure my future is likely to be undone.

In a perfect world, the program would have been continuously correcting, with the eligibility age being floated to be actuarially consistent as the population changed, for starters. The monies would have been held in trust, rather than squandered for Johnson's "Great Society" welfare state. Those two changes would have been a good start… too bad Dems decided that buying votes was a much better use for that money than the reason they'd collected it for.

But the program has always been a scam — a slush fund for free-spending liberals in Congress to fund their socialist notions without actually raising taxes. Social security was originally a narrowly focused program, with past bankruptcies being avoided by dragooning new population segments into the pool, reducing the program to a Ponzi scheme.

It is a bad program that forces citizens to invest monies at a lower rate of return than they could get on their own through the simple expedient of putting it in a bank account, Gary.

Gary: "Please go ahead and teach me and tell me all about Social Security and when it came about and why and it’s orginal puposes and more I so love to learn…"

As demonstrated by your embrace of your own ignorance as a defense in our conversations…

Perhaps if you expect to be taken seriously, you should go learn something about what you would lecture us about, Gary.

Hint: No one was ever meant to live off of SSI as their sole mean of support. It is a supplemental savings program, and a poorly designed one at that.

The fact of the matter is that an ordinary citizen could do far better for themselves investing privately the same monies as the government takes by simply putting the money in a savings account.

The fact is that there is no excess, no "trust-fund" — the government spends it as fast as it comes in, blowing Trillions over the years, putting an IOU in place of the money they squandered, paying a sub-market rate of return. It has become a government slush-fund,with a day of reckoning coming soon.

Gary, do you actually *KNOW* anything about how Social Security operates? Do you even know what it was designed to be?

SSI is a Ponzi scheme — past "investors" are paid off using the current investor payments — if a private citizen or corporation operated a fund in this fashion, they would be arrested for fraud.

The rate of return is pathetic — you'd do better taking that money and putting it in an interest-bearing checking account, let alone investing it in something that might generate real return. Likewise, with a real investment, your survivors would inherit your investment, as opposed to the government pocketing it upon your death.

In short, Gary, SSI *isn't* a good program and its failure / reduction is a statistical inevitability as it is currently constituted.