[dragonwriter]

> The real question is: will I be able to retire on what little SS will provide

SS is a safety-net pension, not intended to be a good retirement on its own, only to mitigate (not even eliminate) poverty should other retirement arrangements fail.

So, yeah, unless your standards are really low, you don't be able to retire on it alone. But that's pretty much by design. It wasn't designed to replace employer pensions.

[dionidium]

The form of this argument is very popular wrt to the minimum wage, too. But setting aside the claim's veracity -- obviously, people had conflicting desires and intentions even at the time -- it's not a very convincing style of argument. We can make these programs whatever we want them to be. I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care very much about the intentions of the people who happened to write the original law.

Even if it happens to be true (and, again, it's not clearly true), it's not a very interesting discussion (outside of a history course) and certainly not one that helps us navigate the best path forward at the present time. Your own references to employer pensions demonstrate how totally irrelevant the original intentions now are, since such pensions have waned in influence significantly in the intervening years.

[dragonwriter]

> The form of this argument is very popular wrt to the minimum wage, too.

I've never seen it; it's pretty clear that minimum wage isn't a fallback in case of private arrangement failure (that's welfare, not minimum wage.)

> We can make these programs whatever we want them to be.

Sure, we could make a general universal first-resort pension. SS has never be designed to be or marketed as that, so you shouldn't expect it to be. (That's orthogonal to whether you should reform it to be one, or replace it with one; a portable, universal, public, actuarially sound defined benefit pensions is, IMO, a great idea.)

> I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care very much about the intentions of the people who happened to write the original law.

I don't particularly care what you care about. The discussion was over various perspectives of the decline of social security, starting with whether it would fail to be there—it was then suggested that it would for political reasons, but the real question was whether it would be an adequate retirement. I was pointing out that the fact that it was perceived as unlikely to be should be unsurprising and not a sign of decline, since it never had been in the past and was never deisgned to serve that purpose.

[dionidium]

Re: your last paragraph, I'd say fair enough :)

Re: the form of the argument as it applies to minimum wage, it works like this:

Argument: "Minimum wage isn't enough for a family to live on!"

Response: "It was never intended to be enough to live on. It's for teenagers, etc, etc."

Note that this path leads us away from all the interesting questions about the minimum wage and into an argument about what lived in the hearts of the people who wrote the original law. That's the inevitable result of this kind of argument and the thing I'm objecting to.