That is the whole problem. If you paid in and you are "rich", should you be entitled to what you put in?
Yes. Even Bill Gates and Donald Trump should be repaid, if they contributed. A promise is a promise.
Some would easily say no. The folks currently in the White house have taken that position. "They must continue to sacrifice". What do you tell these people? If this government was a business, this would be essentially fraud.
There's a good reason that the government isn't run like a business: profit has no part of it. Breaking even would be good, and a surplus would be better [remember when there actually was a surplus?] but it's not about creating or amassing wealth - it's about the people. All of them, not just the ones with power, money, and 'juice'. The ones who mismanaged the money so badly that we don't see any good way to fix it, and they got away with it, too. They're so used to getting away with it, they think they'll never be held accountable, looks like.
The other problem is how it is currently set up. The average person puts in a dollar but actually collects three in benefits. That is partially why these programs are going broke.
I understood the system [SS, at least] was designed to take inflation and increased cost of living into account? And the problem is that the promise to leave the funds untouched for any purpose other than intended was broken - they couldn't resist 'borrowing' money that didn't get repaid.
Working people who put the money into the account should not be cheated out of what they paid for.
That's not the America we think we live in: where the people with political power can renege on promises to repay the money they've collected from working folks, and add insult to injury by calling the repayments 'entitlement programs' that "need to be cut".
No easy answer. People are going to get screwed. It is just a matter of when and how much.
