Reply #43: No, we're going to have to take some form of benefit reduction

[Recursion]

Whether it's in the form of a raising of the retirement age some time in the late 21st century like Simpson and Bowles pitched, or means testing, or transfer of some FICA payments to some form of individual account. SS was never meant to be the primary funding of most Americans' retirements. Assuming Obama does another closed arm-twisting session with the Republicans, exactly what he wrings out of them we don't know, but the experience of the tax cut extension deal makes me optimistic (I don't know anybody who thought he would get an estate tax back, for instance).

I think Andrew Sullivan is right that Obama is going to have to use the SOTU to talk about our long-term debt. My guess (and this is just a guess) is that he's going to sell something like Gore's "lockbox" idea, just in real-time: keep the payroll tax down and redeem trust fund bonds from general revenue paid for by spending cuts somewhere else (eg, the Medicare rate reductions from HCR); this will simultaneously fund SS and reduce the national debt.