You're never going to get the popular will to remove the money from the system, because removing the money from the system means removing it from people.

I don't think progressively removing money from the system would be unpopular. In fact, taxing the rich is extremely popular.

https://www.vox.com/2019/2/4/18210370/warren-wealth-tax-poll

First: Given the amount of money that we're talking about (the amount of the pension deficit), I don't think that just taxing the rich is going to cut it if we need to remove the money from the system. It's going to reach down at least to the upper middle class.

Second: Taxing the rich is extremely popular among the people, but not so much within Congress. This may be because the rich are Congress's constituents in a way that the rest of us theoretically are, but in practice aren't.

Third: For this to work, Congress needs to raise and lower taxes, not based on the popularity of taxes, but on the rate of inflation. Do you really trust Congress to make the right decisions at the right time? I don't. I trust them to make the popular decision, not the right one. ("Popular" perhaps more with the rich, but that's not the point. The point is, they're politicians, not economists. They're listening to what's popular, not to the economic data. They're going to mess this up. The Fed is politically independent for a reason.)