Advice for the new administration: Reform Social Security

 CATO:  Social Security ... operates like a Ponzi scheme: Paying benefits promised to earlier generations depends on new revenues from current and future workers. With an aging population, the worker-to-beneficiary ratio has been decreasing, making Social Security’s finances increasingly unsustainable ...

...Since 2010, the OASI program has added $1.08 trillion to the federal debt and is projected to add $4.1 trillion more by 2033, when the program runs out of borrowing authority and confronts a 21 percent shortfall.

• Slow the growth in future benefits. Under the current system, initial benefits are adjusted based on wage growth, which typically outpaces inflation. [This would eliminate] 85 percent of the program’s long-term funding shortfall.
• Modernize and reduce cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs). 
• Social Security should return to its intended mission of alleviating old-age poverty. [limit benefits to the poor]