Yet I don't understand why the government doesn't simply implement private savings plans and fund the difference out of other income until all the current SS obligations are out of the system. Yes, that will be extremely expensive, but unlike most other government programs it will eventually go away as the proportion of private savings funded retirees increase.
The net cost to the government that would need to be made up is (average payout * payees) - (average SS contribution * employed SS participants).
What could work is a partitioning of the working population. Let everyone born after 1975 switch to private savings. The shortfall to be made up would be dramatically less, because there would still be a lot of participants and significant SS contributions from them. Unfortunately, everyone born before the deadline would have to continue paying into SS until retirement, to prevent the government from having to make up the
entire cost of SS entitlements.
Or they could do something progressive, like let everyone switch to private accounts and then institute a huge progressive tax so that the upper class ends up paying for most of the unfunded SS liabilities.
AND IT'S NOT LIKE THE PROBLEM GOES AWAY IF YOU IGNORE IT!!!!!! (Are you listening, Congress?)
It's in Congresscritters' best interest to put off lose-lose legislation like that until the next session, because then they have a better (near-certain) chance of getting re-elected. This is why theoretically unsound plans like SS should never be adopted in the first place -- they're impossible to get rid of, because whoever suggests getting rid of them will become a scapegoat for failures that existed in the plan as originally implemented.