Again, your initial premise was along the lines of SS was going to start running out of money, so there will need to be benefit cuts. That's the Grover Norquist theory of the case - that if you starve the government of revenue, the government will end up having to shrink their spending.

No, that's called...math. The US government fiscal math hasn't mathed in a long time.

This is the part of the debate where we're talking past each other.

If they run out of money to maintain existing spending, they don't have to cut existing spending. They can raise taxes and get more money. Given the choice between raising taxes or cutting benefits, both parties now will always choose the former.

I don't think you're grokking the current state of the government's finances. Our debt service is > the defense budget. Non-discretionary spending is on a trajectory that's not sustainable. The more money we print, the more we devalue the dollar and the more inflationary pressure gets put on the economy.

I pilot I knew once used to say, "It works until it doesn't". That's our current spending model. You clearly believe that we can just raise confiscatory taxes and make all our problems go away but raising that kind of money has ramifications to the rest of the economy. You're consistently stating how "popular" all these programs are but you're forgetting that "popular" is always relative. As in, popularity is relative to other alternatives and outcomes and to the effect that things have on everyday life. "Defund the police" was popular amongst the elite leftist set until their cities started circling the drain. Then the worm turned and places like San Francisco started actually enforcing the law and started hiring more officers. Now Defund the Police isn't so popular any more.

You're going to see how "popular" paying for these services remains once people realize they can't pay for their own lives any longer, when they realize that they're not able to go on vacation like they used to or they can't retire for 5 more years or they find themselves working more and more and spending less time with their families just to maintain a worsening lifestyle. When they weigh all that versus keeping ill-structured promises made back in the 1930s and 1960s then the popularity of entitlement programs will be different.

And at that point of extreme sacrifice, calls for change will begin.