I've never been much in the the idea of a social contract. Not even in the sense its normally used (where I've replied "I never signed any contract"), and not in this sense either. Political promises don't give you any moral right to future spending, just as they don't give you any legal right.
People "pay in to SS", which just means they are paying a tax. If you actually had that money held and invested for you, you'd have a better claim on it as in a certain moral sense belonging to you, or as entitlement you to some benefit, but that wasn't what happened. It was spent just as your income tax payments where spent.
To pay you, and then later to pay me, the government has to take from others. I recognize the fact that the government is likely to take from others for all sorts of purposes, but the fact that A paid for B, (say I paid SS taxes that are going to my parents retirement pay), doesn't mean that A has an right to the wealth of C (the next generation to pay for my SS payments).
I think the programs where created in this way partially to create the impression that there was such an obligation, to make the programs politically harder to cancel, but the reality is you paid a tax like any other tax.
As a purely practical matter, if you've had tens, or to a lesser degree even hundreds, of millions of people structure their lives around a policy, then it can cause a lot of harm if you suddenly massively change that policy. But that has nothing to do with any contract, or any right (other than the legal right created by current law) to the money.
And even without changing the terms of the program, considering the current legal rights as sacrosanct, when the nominal trust fund "runs out", the program would have to cut payments to the income received. People continuing to receive full payments beyond that would amount to extending the program beyond current law, not just following through on what the law currently says. |
