Like anything else in America we're going to need a crisis for anyone to even consider doing something to resolve the problem. It seems to me that a drastic cut in military spending, raising the retirement age to 70, raising taxes on everyone, closing tax loopholes, and an across the board cut of 5%-10% should be a good start to get this resolved in the next 20 years.
That's idiotic. The official US unemployment rate is nearly 10%. The U6 unemployment rate, which is probably closer to what one actually means when one asks "how many people are looking for work" is twice that high. One in every four Americans who wants a job does not have one and we're going to raise the retirement age? What earthly good will that do?
Same difference. When you take away money that older people are living on, you force them to look for work. Which, in this economy, will tend to make them unemployed.
I suppose great-grandma can always move in with her grandkids. Of course, the grandkids are also 25% likely to be unemployed.
Naturally, there is a subset of people for whom Social Security is a needless luxury because they are living off of private investments. The proper way to target these people for additional funds is to nudge up the marginal tax rate on those private investments. This is difficult to accomplish, of course, because people with lots of money can afford to buy votes.
Also the age at which they might crash the market when they're all forced to begin dumping their 401(k) and IRA holdings. Kiyosaki called this "Rich Dad's Prophecy".
