Social Security was implemented in 1935 as part of Roosevelt's "New Deal" following the Great Depression and the collapse of the American economy. It was enacted to be a fully funded retirement plan, meaning its benefits are paid out of a fund built up over the years from contributions made by Social Security taxpayers. The program's first step away from this was in 1942 when it began to pay out its first pension. There is a crisis within the program that we speak of today which deals with the impending lack of funds we will have in the near future. It is predicted that the so-called "Social Security trust fund" (a bunch of Treasury Department IOU's, in actuality) will be depleted somewhere around 2027. This is a concern because Social Security has been turned into a pay-as-you-go system. Today, workers outnumber retirees with a ratio of around 3.4:1. iOnce the baby boomer generation begins to retire and causes a reduction in the workforce, the worker to retiree ratio will be closer to 2:1 by 2040. This is distress to our nation because we will not be taking in enough money to pay out the pensions of the retirees.
             Our government has already tried to reduce the impact of the Social Security problem by raising the percentage of taxes taken out of individuals' paychecks, by raising the maximum level of income taxed, and by raising the retirement age to be 67 in the year 2022. According to Social Security's activists, the most likely picture implies that the payroll tax would need to rise from 12.4% to more than 19% in 2075 to pay future pensions ("Straight Talk"). The chart portrays this situation. This solution and others have not and will not be enough to solve our problems. These are only short-term fixes and the problem reaches far beyond the baby boomers generation. There must be other steps taken and one main possibility is to privatize Social Security, whether in whole or just partially. It is this privatization issue and i...