A big point I'm trying to make on Social Security is that the 401K experiment has been a failure. We have a set of policies - including big tax expenditures for tax deductible employer/employee retirement benefit contributions - which are supposed to lead to the majority of seniors being able to retire in relative comfort and security. And what we're seeing now, decades later, is that experiment is a failure.
All this gets beaten back by the glibertarian crowd as "people should just save and invest, blah blah blah." Well, fine, but they aren't. Not enough. For whatever reason. So we're going to have a bunch of seniors in poverty and near poverty. What are we going to do about it, now and for the future?