The only Social Security security crisis is that the Republicans are trying to "fix" it. (for a definition of fix, refer to the sense used in "the fix is in")
But there is a problem with Social Security, it doesn't mean real security. It's not enough security. And the places you can live if your family cannot take you in, on Social Security, are dwindling and not generally appropriate for the respect our elderly citizens have earned.
The solution is not accounts or cash benefits. These don't ensure you can die in the city you loved and helped build. These don't ensure you can have some simple pleasures of life.
Every old person helped build this place. And I think it will be crucial to increase the amounts paid out of Social Security. But the fundamental solution to these issues is not found in the accounts or in tuning them..
As I've said before (hope you were listening), progressive government is about infrastructure, physical infrastructure.
... explained below ...
Roads, fire departments, schools, phone systems, water supply, health clinics, education in general and especially education aiming to fill the infrastructural needs. And this is where the solution lies for Social Security, in my not particularly humble but open minded opinion. We need to build the physical infrastructure to ensure a decent standard of living is provided to those that need it.
Private enterprise has shown us that we can build elderly living centers and run them at reasonable costs, but there are not enough such centers, and there is no guarantee you can get in or that the place will survive. If you are short a few dollars a month you are out, if you need special care for just a while, you can be sunk, if the businessman in charge screws up, the center closes, you're homeless.
What we need is a billion dollar project to build elderly living centers backed by the state.
They need to be nice, have green areas with paved paths so wheelchair bound elderly people can get out and smell the flowers. They should be in nice places and I have no problem with the idea of using eminent domain or whatever we need to get nice places to build these centers without making it 300 miles away from these peoples communities.
They don't have to be filled with luxury, but seniors need their own small space, they need fast response to medical situations, they need a phone of their own, and for those able to use them they need to have mini kitchens, craft and work areas. They need activities and to be well staffed. These sorts of facilities work well, very well, right up to death for many people. They work right up until totally bed ridden and on life support.
I've seen some last-resort nursing homes, full of dying people screaming out four to a room, with many of the people trapped there that could in fact survive a proper elderly care facility, but they'll never recover there. The way to take care of the elderly is to... take care of them.
It's not to allot money and say "good luck with that!" I mean, that's good too, maybe they will have good luck with that, maybe they have someone to live with, but if we want to ensure not one old person is dying in the street after a life of building this nation, then the way to do that is - just do it. Provide the place to live. Build the infrastructure. It creates jobs, it creates motivation to work hard in your life, it reduces stress because even if your plans to retire wealthy fall through, you don't have to fall to the street or to a death market.
Make the places pleasant. Make sure it has entertainment, a library, activities, and while this is still not perfect, it is at least a decent way to spend the last few years of your life or the last decade.
I think the cost of this would be the construction and political turmoil (I said eminent domain up there... uh oh). Once such infrastructure was built, I'm certain it would save money. Many people would avoid ending up in nursing facilities because they ended up in a hospital that won't recuperate them to semi-mobility. They won't end up in hospital emergency rooms because they didn't receive proper elderly care, the saving would come from managing the cost of the last years of life, which I have read accounts for the lion's share of medical costs in America.
Sure, people probably would still prefer to not be sent off to such facilities, to not lose their house, to live with relatives, and they should still try to set up something even more to their liking. The current system should stay in place, people should be encouraged to help them in their retirement dreams.
But that does not mean we don't know what "decent" means even if aunt Mabel won't quite like it well enough, and that doesn't mean we cannot provide something as a society that we could be proud to represent as the absolute bottom limit of what is acceptable for those about whose life we'll write our future histories.