>>Those deficits, not the age battle you posit, are bankrupting SS and Medicare, because the US Treasury has:
>>a. raided their reserves to fund tax cuts, wars and bailouts
>>b. not contributed to the reserves because of a shortage of money created by tax cuts, wars and bailouts.

The paper reserves are still there- a point previously made by Dragan- but the issue for Medicare is that it ran as a Ponzi scheme. Your contributions did not result in sufficient surplus to cover your own future predictable needs, simple as that. So new contributions from new suckers are required to keep it going. Trouble is that there are no suckers left.

In the case of Medicare, expenditure growth has exceeded inflation which is why the failure to run a surplus to invest to cover future predictable needs is a double whammy. Not only did you not pay enough tax, but the alternative source of the premium surpluses of the young instead are privatized and sucked away as dividends.

>>Of course young people pay for older people's care. That's as old as human history.

What if they can't? As an exercise in simple math: how quickly do you want to resolve the 17T Medicare deficit? Assuming that there are 122 million taxpayers, you're looking at $140,000 per taxpayer to cover the $17T. Perhaps spread it over 10 years so it's only an extra $14,000 tax per year per taxpayer, including kids and part-timers. This is what loading it all onto the young now means. Even if they wanted to make this sacrifice for you- I'm not sure they can.

>>However, when the money that the young people put up to take care of old people is used to fund tax cuts for Woody Johnson, mindlessly slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi's and bail out Goldman Sachs, things get dicey.

That's not my understanding. I agree that the Social Security surplus is converted to paper as the actual $ was raided for other purposes, but technically the $ still is there. That's not why it's going to run out: that's going to happen because there's more going out than coming in.