On September 12, the pioneering Rep. Thaddeus McCotter introduced trailblazing legislation providing workers the freedom to choose personal savings and investment accounts to finance half of their future Social Security benefits. This legislation would completely solve the future Social Security financing problem, without cutting benefits or raising taxes, as officially scored by the Chief Actuary of Social Security.

Indeed, because standard, long-term market investment returns are so much higher than what Social Security even promises, workers with personal accounts will enjoy higher rather than lower benefits. Moreover, the legislation would result in the greatest reduction in government spending in world history, as explained below.

Why Social Security Is Fundamentally Broken

Next year the Baby Boom begins to retire on Medicare in earnest, and the year after that on Social Security. For decades now, the federal government's own official reports have been showing that Social Security would not be able to pay all promised benefits to the baby boom without dramatic, unsustainable tax increases.

Last year, Social Security began running a cash deficit, for the first time since President Reagan saved the program in 1983. Under what the government's actuaries call intermediate assumptions, those deficits will continue until the Social Security trust funds run out of funds to pay promised benefits by 2037. After that, paying all promised Social Security and Medicare benefits financed by the payroll tax will require eventually almost doubling that tax from 15.3 percent today to nearly 30 percent.

Under what the government's actuaries call pessimistic assumptions, the Social Security trust funds will run out of funds to pay promised benefits by 2029. After that, paying all promised benefits to today's young workers would eventually require raising the total payroll tax rate to 44 percent, three times current levels, and ultimately more.