You completely underestimate how the average person finds something more important to spend money on now rather than saving for their future. The reason we have social security is because people don't save what they need to. If you don't have this, most of the population will be in poverty when they retire. Social security also has things like survivor's benefits: payments to children and dependents who have lost a wage earner.
I don't think the Social Security program is at all broken; what's broken is that we've used the Social Security surplus over the last 20+ years to help fund a general fund spending deficit.
What you've described is a symptom that can't just be fixed by closing your eyes and throwing money at the government while saying, "Give this back when I need it, OK?"
If the populace doesn't have the discipline to control and organize their extra resources, how can we expect politicians to do so? And why do we even trust them to do it? It's sad that people with the attitude you've described were able to convince the government to enact this as a mandatory thing -- but, the government likes money. We've seen what a faithful steward they have been for us.
People without the self-restraint to save money for a period of time where they expect to live without performing any money-generating work have problems that can't be fixed so simply. Maybe that's the cause of all of this turmoil in the first place.
The idea of "retirement" is also a curious new invention; people didn't save for retirement before the industrial revolution because back then, people would own houses and lands, accumulate real wealth that could be used to sustain life (e.g., agricultural assets) when individuals got too old to perform the work themselves, etc.
The pace of change since the 1860s has been extremely staggering and has introduced many concerns that hadn't existed previously. It is an intriguing matter to be sure. Hopefully we can come out of it all right.
"The reason we have social security is because people don't save what they need to."
Have a law forcing people to put the money into a conservative retirement plan of their choosing.
"I don't think the Social Security program is at all broken; what's broken is that we've used the Social Security surplus over the last 20+ years to help fund a general fund spending deficit."
Absolutely true. But we've also used that surplus to spend much more on current retirees than they ever put in.
If that is true -- people universally don't save what they need to -- than the proposed social security program of taxing everyone to give to the poor will be identical to what we have now.
It isn't entirely true, though. If you look at any net worth by age chart, the values go up with the age categories. People do save, just maybe not enough.
I don't think the Social Security program is at all broken; what's broken is that we've used the Social Security surplus over the last 20+ years to help fund a general fund spending deficit.