Their strategy: make it harder for the current system to survive for future generations while deliberately increasing the benefits for those who are currently receiving them. The end result is that the program will eventually go broke and will have to be terminated. They will then blame the Libs for mismanaging it in order to to justify the shutdown.

As a backup plan, they will either manipulate the electoral system so that the old fart vote no longer matters, or they will engineer a conflict between the old and young that will persuade sufficient voters to demand its demise.

I’ve seen this coming since the Reagan Administration and my plan was to accumulate sufficient resources to be able to live off my pensions, savings and assets until I eventually croaked. Whether I am successful or not depends on whether or not my health holds out until I die, and how long I live. I have little control over either of those eventualities, but I do believe I have improved my odds as much as possible. Didn’t I tell you that a sound understanding of current political reality is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for planning your future? You can’t control the wind but you can always trim your sails.

Right now I am living very comfortably on both my Social Security benefit and my pension from my old job at the County.
Neither of these is sufficient on its own to allow me to both live long and prosper, but both together are more than sufficient, especially if you maintain a backup stash to help smooth out any noise in the signal.
However, if EITHER ONE of my pensions is terminated or severely cut back, I am on backup battery power until I die.

https://media1.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExMnY2djN0eDFkZDhsamRpdGZtYW4wNG1ranB6cXppN3Y0ZDVoempuNyZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/F1ruOnxSfqFWM/giphy.gif

If you don’t elect to start receiving benefits as soon as you’re eligible you risk getting squeezed out altogether. Why else would they be working so hard to convince you to postpone retirement as long as possible?

Always on the table, on life support, the tubes could be pulled.

And knowing there are those that want to pull those tubes.

The current maximum amount of taxable earnings for Social Security is $176,100. So anyone making more than that pays the exact same amount in as someone making $176,100. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, the orange shitatain, etc all pay SS taxes only up to the first $176.1k they make.

As Bernie Sanders says so often, raise the maximum amount of taxable earnings for Social Security to $1 million, problem solved for 100 years.