Having irrefutably established SS is not causing Americas bankruptcy (actually PREVENTED it for 30 years, ) debating its return rate/size is quite reasonable.

Risk and return are inherently proportional in any investment; government securities (including the special Treasury securities unique to the SS trust fund) typically pay very low returns, because they carry very low risk. Investors CAN do better in the stock market—at the substantial risk of instead getting NO return. The US government (theoretically...) will not go bankrupt, nor Obama abscond to the Caymans with all our money. Even banks holding savings accounts can fail, like Citigroup and so many others did, but America has NEVER defaulted on a debt, so SSs return is the closest thing in the world to a sure thing; its rate reflects that. People who invested in stocks and retired in 1998 did well; those who retired in 2002, not so much. We dare not gamble with the whole nations retirement fund.

Pensions cannot be evaluated like other investments anyway though, because only their regular payment, NOT total return, is fixed. Bearing in mind our other recent discussion, a person who died at 160 would get an outstanding return from SS; people who die at 60 get none (though their survivors may.) Social Security is fundamentally different from most other investments because its goal is not to maximize wealth, but minimize poverty.

There are still many ways it could be improved WITHOUT making it a high risk windfall for brokerage firms. We could eliminate the witholding limit and/or means test it (I prefer to treat these as a tradeoff.) Even though SS no longer collects more than it pays, it currently has more money than six months ago—because most people have not hit the annual witholding limit yet; that demonstrates how easily we could save the system. We SHOULD legally fix the Cost of Living Adjustment at the annual inflation rate instead of higher (I believe the sequester deal did so.) Since US life expectancy has risen from 65 (when SS was created) to 78, we could increase the retirement age to reflect that (as we technically did in 1983, but raising retirement age 2 years and phasing it in by 2027 can NOT do the job.)

We could also end our thirty year addiction to collecting trillions for SS, noting the funds as Treasury securities—then spending them on everything BUT SS. However, since the Boomers retirement made 2010 the last time SS collected more than it spent those days are over regardless. We still owe SS $2.7 trillion, and if walking away from THAT creditor is legal and moral perhaps we should do the same with China: We only owe them HALF as much.