How about having a real social security trust fund?

It didn’t take long for the politicians to discover that the Social Security “trust fund” could be raided for immediate spending. This was done by having Social Security hold the “trust fund” in government bonds, which meant that the asset on one side of the government was just a liability on the other. This has gone on for decades and the last time I recall anybody railing about this shell game was during the Reagan administration.

If Social Security were really a pension plan, there would be no problem at all coping with demographic changes. Simply taking the current level of worker and employee “contributions” and investing them in a classic conservative “sixty-forty” portfolio (60% stocks [say, an S&P 500 index fund], 40% investment grade bonds), the funds would have grown over time to be more than adequate to pay retirees.