I'm going to try this one time, and I expect you to completely ignore me.
Older people are out of time to adjust their retirement strategy, while younger workers have years to work out new plans. Yanking SS now, without warning, hits the most vulnerable workers, the stationary targets. This makes them the most inviting targets for liberals to loot, which is why I'm not surprised to see what side of this issue you're on. When you're not promoting abortion or trying to take guns from people, you're always taking the looting path. Ayn Rand had you pegged.
I never, of course, advocated "yanking SS now", for old folks or anyone else. That's the sort of hysterical and misleading argument liberals love to make, so for you to adopt such tactics is hardly surprising.
What I want to do it save SS so that it's still there for future generations. Millennials will be supporting us baby boomers in our old age; what does our generation owe them? Nothing except your selfish rhetoric?
SS can be fixed by raising taxes and/or reducing benefits. If we exempt boomers from being part of the solution, then our kids and grandkids will rightly resent us - we've had the promise of income security in old age our entire lives, but they face only an uncertain future of endless work until body and soul depart.
Granted, what you advocate is similar, of course, to most politicians - leave SS alone for us older folks, just reduce benefits for the young - after all, they have "more years to adjust their plans". But why shouldn't we ALL share in addressing the problem? The substantive change I was suggesting - eliminating the automatic COLA - might be enough on its own to fix the system for many years. (Couple that change with the elimination of the wage base cap on FICA taxes, and no other changes may be needed.)
Private pension plans almost never provide for automatic COLAs. To do so is to burden current worker and management for the retirements of those long gone. You never see automatic COLAs in private pension plans because retired workers lose their clout once their gone. But with SS, old folks never lose their clout - they're the most powerful lobby of all. So asking older folks to sacrifice along with everyone else is political poison - us boomers have earned the right to be selfish, folks like you say, as we smugly proclaim we've "paid in" already. But that's fiction - it is a pay as you go system.
Eliminating the automatic COLA does wonders to repair the power imbalance between generations, which is now unfairly skewed toward the takers and against those who are currently working and producing. Leaving future cost of living adjustments to the political process allows millennials a voice in the matter.
