Fred the Red Shirt wrote:

I realize that is the socialist perspective and I reject it.

First of all, any retirement plan functions like insurance,
some claimants get more than they put in while others
get less. Social Security was running a surplus up until
the time that LBJ convinced the Congress to merge it into
the General Fund, even without investing the money.

SS is still running a surplus and will be for the next decade or so.
From it's inception under FDR, the SS surplus has been "invested" in
intra governmental bonds by law. This means any surplus has always been
bought from SS by the federal government in exchange for an IOU. What
was changed is the federal government accounting of this - the surplus
received from SS is counted as revenue for the current fiscal year, and
the IOU is NOT counted as an expenditure. This leads folks to believe
there really was a surplus in the late '90s when in fact the national
debt has increased every year since 1960.

The SS and the 150 or so other trust funds account for $4 trillion of
the $9 trillion debt.

Politicians who talk about "raiding" the trust fund are either ignorant
of the current law and situation or trying to obfuscate thinking that
the public doesn't know there's no money in the fund to be raided and
there never has been. They also reject the only other form of
investment which would be non governmental notes and equities
(privatization) as being too "risky" and instead suggest increasing the
withholding thereby accumulating debt at an even faster rate!