The salient issue when talking about U.S. Social Security in today’s times does not have anything to do with reform or removal of the system, the most important problem with social security is the dependency that the system has acquired. Go ahead and ask your average middle aged man or woman what their retirement plans are, if they work in a blue collar industry, and what their income is going to look like at 70 years old. There is no real survey data to substantiate this claim but I would put money down on the most common answer being a mix of “I don’t know” or…”Social Security”. The government has already announced and reiterated many a time that the system will go bankrupt within the next ten years, yes TEN YEARS. The 2020 run out expectation has been known publicly since the second bush administration and probably within the government for the last 30 years if not since Roosevelt implemented it.
As times get harder and the economy spreads the rich-poor gap wider and wider, more and more Americans are going to be relying on a system that won’t exist. So in order to solve the problem of what to do as one gets closer and closer to retirement without a plan, America needs to take incredible action NOW. Unfortunately, as much as the politicians want to talk about reforming the tax code or “Robin Hooding” the wealthy, at the end of the day, none of plans proposed so far will do anything to change the fact that in 2020 the United States of America will still be several trillions of dollars in debt, regardless of what changes now. With that much debt there is simply no way that social security will be at the top of the pecking order for the little money that this nation produces at that time.
So what I propose is to kill the system now and use whatever money there is to set up no-income retirement communities. This is the most extreme idea you’re bound to hear by far and it is indeed preposterous but it will be the one of the only ways that this nation’s elderly get older under the current system. These communities would be funded by the same money that is being taken for social security now but the freedom of those in the system to do what they wish with it (gamble, booze, take vacations, smoke, etc) will be removed. If you are retired and you have no more money, as an American citizen you will have the right to move into a government run retirement center where all your needs will be provided for; you will have food on the table, a roof over your head, and all your medical needs taken care of.
This proposal will sadly not come until the current system completely collapses, because of its civil rights violations, but when it does (and it will), what rises from the ashes will be an absolute distinction between those that have made strong retirement plans and those that have not. And as time goes by, more and more young people will see the lives they’ll be forced to live if they don’t work harder and make preparations now. Government exists to do for its citizens what they CANNOT do for themselves; not to do for them what they WOULD NOT do for themselves.