>>>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.
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>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.
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>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.
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>>>Of course young people pay for older people's care. That's as old as human history.
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>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 including kids and part timers, 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. Who could blame the young for condlusing that the Gerontocracy wanted to pay less tax to accumulate personal wealth, and now they pull up the ladder behind themselves and sit on price-inflated property while expecting the serfs to pay for everything.
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>>>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.
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>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.

Social Security and Medicare are two different creatures and really should be treated that way.
Social Security is an annuity, and it's actuarially possible to calculate the amount of money that will be needed x years from today to pay annuitants with a pretty good degree of accuracy.
That's because the benefits to be paid are relatively predictable. You either have enough money to pay it or you don't. If you're short, where you get it is a political decision.
I personally favor raising the FICA withholding limit substantially or taking it off completely and letting high earners eliminate the shortfall.
Based on what I've read, that will just about do it, or even create a surplus, provided that the raided reserves are returned.


Medicare is a different animal. There are actuarial tables that try to predict future benefits, but they're almost all based on claims history.
With shifting definitions of what "medical" means (birth control, Viagra, libido boosters, cosmetic surgery, toenail clipping, feel good pills, blah, blah) and providers who have a vested interest in increasing costs you have the chaos that we now call medical care.
The potential for Medicare fraud is huge.. and there are people making millions gaming the system.
With a moving target like that it would take Houdini to predict what the cost will be 30 years from now and frankly I don't have a clue as to what to do about it.