[sunshinelackof]

The weakest part of social security is that it's thought of as a pension and not as a service that government provides to the elderly and disabled. If government wished, it could be funded fully, regardless of whether it's "solvent."

It's not question of financial viability as much as it is a question of how much value we, or The US, puts on the lives of the elderly. Or otherwise framed as: How little we can spend on the elderly without the reemergence of poorhouses.

There are obvious concerns about having a healthy and productive tax base, but that will always be the case. Implicating the tax base for the existence of a government service is just politics.