See, that is the problem: Ponzis CANNOT achieve ANY surplus, by definition, because contributors quickly equal beneficiaries. That is a practical impossibility for SS; the Census Bureaus 50 year projection is for US population to grow throughout, by >100 million between now and 1960. More importantly for this discussion, after 2035 Baby Bust replaces Baby Boom, and the rate of median age increase drops from ~0.12%/year to ~0.06%, while the growth in population >65 drops from ~1 million/year to ~0.5 million/year. In fact, in 2040 and 2045 the ratio of people 20-65:65+ actually INCREASES (Baby Bust.)

Speaking of ratios, current SS beneficiary:employed ratio is 2.73, not 2; do not let anyone tell you differently. http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/FACTS// http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm

Currently, ~19% of SS beneficiaries are <65 (which seems high, especially considering that is using Dec 2012 beneficiary numbers and 2015 population projections.) Assuming that held through 2060, at "full" employment (i.e. 5%) the ratio would (only just) hit 2% that year (1.99.) It would go UP in 2040 and 2045 (Baby Bust.)

On the contrary, it was almost inevitable. Any group preoccupied with steadily rising populations and resulting resource demands must sooner or later realize elderly populations depend on working populations ALWAYS several times larger. Fact is, it always HAS; the end of extended families just made it more obvious few elderly people can go it alone. Zero Population Growth did not produce social security insurance, and I doubt even most liberals support ZPG, but even if both were true social security insurance would just be making lemonade out of lemons. Steadily rising populations and their resource demands are a LOGISTIC, not LIBERAL, concern; saying conservatives/Republicans ignore them would be the best argument ever for not letting them NEAR a government.

shrugs If it is an argument from expediency rather than morality, the Treasury securities the Fed, private citizens, commercial banks and mutual funds hold are worth more than the OTHER Treasuries SS has, more still if we include those held by private and public pension funds. If canceling the 20% of US Treasuries SS has is practical, canceling the 30% of Treasuries OTHER Americans have is HALF AGAIN as practical. If not, not. Roughly 67% of US federal debt is owed to Americans, and if the biggest chunk is SS, nearly HALF ALL US debt is owed to people who refuse to pay taxes yet demand the investment return taxes finance. If we are to talk of canceling Treasury securities for moral or practical reasons, let us start there.

You may not want to talk about the moral dimension, but did raise it, and I fear we must. Because "starve the beast" was both fraudulent and immoral.

DECADES of demanding tax cut after tax cut to KNOWINGLY and INTENTIONALLY make historys richest nation its biggest debtor, just as an excuse to call SS and Medicares demise "unavoidable," was immoral. Lining a few already-bulging pockets with the pensions millions of hard working people scrimped each month of their whole career to save was fraudulent. In that sense, you are right SS was not conceived as, but transformed into, a Ponzi scheme—not by retirees expecting exactly the monthly payout SS promised them in regular letters, but by folks like Grover Norquist insisting their latest tax cut was insufficient, ever demanding another financed (well, PARTIALLY... ) by the enduring SS surplus.

From the start back in 1981, when the deficit was <$1 trillion, members of both parties incessantly warned SS would begin running deficits in 2010 and bring the feeding frenzy to a halt. Thirty years and $15 trillion dollars later we have proven those incompetent government bean counters 100% correct. Now the hard working people who financed that generation long smörgåsbord are discovering the same thing as everyone who invested retirement money with Ken Lay, Bernie Madoff, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Bros: A few dishonest people who did not need their money took it anyway, and when asked where it went just shrug and say, "BANKRUPT! " on their way back to The Nineteenth Hole.

You are old enough and politically active enough not to need "starve the beasts" meaning or origin explained, why Cheney infamously declared as VP that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." I just wish most of the US were equally well informed. This was no more an accident than the Lincoln assassination was a weapons malfunction. Social Security was fine until the Tax Cuts at Any Price crowd emptied a clip into its chest; now that the witnesses are gathering they have reloaded, put the gun to its head and tearfully announced, "it is beyond saving; decency permits no choice." To paraphrase Mae West, decency had nothing to do with it.

"Starve the beast" was an "inside job," "controlled demolition" on a scale to stun Truthers; anyone not following politics for each of the past thirty years would never know—so most do not. You and I do, and if Romney was right that the federal debt is our biggest national security threat, what does that make its creators...?