The GOP says Social Security and Medicare are irretrievably broken with the private sector the only cure. The Social Security Chief Actuary calls the 75 -year vesting situation "challenging." There is a gulf between a challenge, a call to action, and the GOP lies. Social Security can run until 2036 without any change and then still pay about 75 percent of the due benefit from taxes. Social Security needs a relatively modest revenue increase and an end to cures that promise to kill the patient.
Spoiled rich kids like Paul Ryan think the elderly need to leave a nest egg for their heirs (as he proposed in legislation to gut Social Security).
Most retirees are more concerned about avoiding poverty. Too many live below the poverty line now and their meager Social Security couldn't pay current bills, much less the bill for the added cost to them of Paul Ryan's privatized bastard version of Medicare. The chart below the fold will make some things clearer.
Social Security is sound in the near term, a judgment of the system's Chief Actuary. How difficult would it be to "fix" it to be actuarially sound through 75 years from now. Not really that hard, except that one party is suffering from severe ideological constipation of the brain and need a purgative. I'm including a chart below that while some numbers are dated, the general trends continue to be on the money given the 75 year actuarial period. recently from the new ideological religion of Ayn Rand.
This chart below isn't new, but published in a federal employee organization magazine, it was rare unbiased information from Congressional Quarterly six years ago and it still is despite slightly outdated figures, i.e. a bad fix still won't work while a good one will.