Leah gave me a copy of James Galbraith's The Predator State, which contains the best description of the Social Security "debate" that I've seen. Pages 138 -139. It's long, but it's good, good, good:

The financial crisis argument rests on the large numbers of baby boomers set to start retiring -- on the fact that eventually payroll tax receipts will start to fall short of benefits due and that at some point in the middle distance, the bonds accumulated in the trust fund will have to be retired. Yet the reality is that this was the bargain established by the 1983 Greenspan Commmission. The baby boom was old news when this commission convened; it understood the demographics perfectly well, and nothing that has happened since has made the situation worse. On the contrary, the labor force has grown more rapidly in the years since 1983, thanks to higher levels of immigration than were foreseen and the recovery of productivity growth in the late 1990s, generating a larger economy from which projected benefits could be paid. If the Greenspan Commission, notwithstanding the reactionary deal it made, dealt effectively with the need to match tax receipts to the stream of benefits due, then the finances of the system are actually better today than they were expected to be back then. And therefore if the Greenspan Commission resolved the crisis, there can be no crisis now. And there is not.

Seen this way, efforts to cut benefits to the impending baby boom retirees are a way, simply put, of taking back the 1983 bargain. If they were enacted, the very same people who overpaid their payroll taxes to "prefinance" their Social Security benefits would find that they had been given a dishonest bargain. Having paid a lifetime of higher payroll taxes, subsidizing the income tax cuts enjoyed by the investor classes of the 1980s and 1990s, they would come to the end of the rainbow and find the pot of gold empty.

Except for their 410(k)s, of course. Not.