Some algorithm just fed me a story about a guy who has worked for 27 years at an airport Burger King and got the dinkiest of commemorations from management. When a video about it went viral, his daughter set up a GoFundMe on his behalf to raise a little $ for him to visit his grandkids. When I just read it it had raised north of $300k. If it made it to my eyes it will probably raise a million.
It is no doubt a touching story. I was touched. But though it's easy to raise a bunch of money for one person, it's hard to raise and administer a bunch of money for hundreds of millions of people. Everyone rues the disappearance of traditional, defined benefit pension schemes, failing to understand that their generous payouts were all about the prevailing dependency ratio (number of workers to retirees) and secular growth of the economy, itself dependent on population growth and easy productivity growth.
Social Security is deucedly complex but it's the best thing we have going. It is unfortunately a pay as you go system, not backed by a huge pool of assets managed by (very mortal and fallible) professionals, so it's dependent on people paying into it. Which is why if we can't waive a wand and increase the birth rate (and we can't) we need more immigrants.
Beyond that, we have only defined contribution plans, mostly 401ks, which people need to manage for themselves. Greenspan and Paul O'Neill (otherwise a great guy) wanted to privatize Social Security and make it more or less like a 401k, but it's a good thing they didn't. Its problems make it possible for us to focus on our highest order challenges.
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