The supply of workers will never be exhausted. The program will be tweaked, as it has been all along, to ensure it remains fully functions.

Read up on it, it's a lot more interesting than the "it's going broke!!" stuff makes it out to be.

Oh my a short term mismatch in the system; as if we can't make an adjustment. What would privatization of Social Security employ when the stock market crashes, which happens from time to time, to moderate the negative effects. In fact, moderation isn't good enough, it'd have to completely smooth away any negative effect for it to be even remotely tenable. Oh the old people have to move out of their apartment if they can't afford it now? Too bad?

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/25/millennials-...

If there wasn't a fertility decline in the Western world, there wouldn't be a lopsided ratio of retirees to new incoming workers.

That future probably wasn't terribly obvious to the politicians who created them (given that most public pension plans were created roughly between World War I and a bit after World War II).

In fact, based on some of the literature of the time (eg The Population Bomb -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb -- etc.) I'd say it's more like people were fearing the reverse.