About That Spending Problem

It's really a revenue and inequality problem:

As a society, we will produce far more than enough goods and services to preserve Social Security and Medicare in their current form without making younger people worse off. But these programs will consume a growing share of total societal resources, and since they are administered by the federal government, that requires higher taxes.
So the real point isn't that we can't afford Social Security and Medicare. It's that some people don't want to pay the higher taxes necessary to maintain Social Security and Medicare. This is a question of distribution, pure and simple.
At first blush, it may appear that young people don't want to pay for retirement benefits and health care for old people. But most of us will be both young and old at different points in our lives, so we're on both sides of the transfer. The real issue is that Social Security and Medicare are risk-spreading programs, which means that rich people** end up subsidizing poor people.
When people say that we can't afford our entitlement programs, they're really saying that rich people won't pay the taxes necessary to sustain our entitlement programs. To be fair, many rich people probably would be willing to pay higher taxes if they knew the facts. But a small number of extremely rich people have successfully spread the myth that we can't afford our entitlement programs.

Amen.  Why doesn't this get brought up more?  People have paid like $4 trillion dollars ahead into Social Security, but since that money has already been spent on things that would have been paid for by income taxes that were cut by Republican presidents, we have to cut Social security.  How about getting rid of the damn tax cuts?