Splitting the Baby (Social Security Revisited)

I'm continually perplexed by the division in the nation politically. Nobody disagrees that Social Security is bankrupt. (LINK to CNBC - Voice of the Liberal Media) The money that should have been restricted was dumped into the General Fund by President Lyndon Johnson to help pay for the Viet Nam War. The current Democratic majority in Congress and the president assert that it's not bankrupt and that Republicans (who warn of dire circumstances) want to take Social Security payments from the pockets of pensioners.

No matter WHO wins when, the Social Security monster looms and everybody wants to pass the ball to the next Congress in the hopes that it won't have to be faced by them, on their watch. This sort of irresponsibility is what we've come to expect from politicians. Nothing new here, folks. We can let Social Security splat on the wall at 100 MPH, or we can change the way we do business. 

People who are retired need to retain their current benefit structure.

People who haven't retired need to face harsh realities:

1. We need to raise the age at which people can collect Social Security benefits.
2. We need to restrict the fund so that the Federal Government can't steal the money to use it on this or that pork barrel project to include war, feeding welfare recipients or foreign aid to a corrupt dictatorship.
3. We need to change the way the payments are made and the basis upon which they're made. I'm not the expert who will make that decision in detail, but it's clearly the way we need to approach the situation.

Or you can do what we're doing now, and twenty years in the future there will be no Social Security benefits paid out to anyone (but the government will still take it from your paycheck the way they do now).