<blockquote>'In addition, the progressive elimination of the Social Security/Medicare system would operate to promote saving and capital accumulation. The saving of individuals would steadily replace taxes as the source of provision for old age. The increased capital accumulation that this made possible would, of course, increase the demand for labor and the productivity of labor, which means that it would increase wage rates and the supply of goods, which latter would operate to reduce prices. Thus, real wages and the general standard of living would rise. The rise would be a continuing one insofar as the rate of capital accumulation was permanently increased as the result of greater saving and a correspondingly greater concentration on the production of capital goods relative to consumers' goods.
At the same time, however, over the course of the many years that would be required for the burden of Social Security/Medicare to reach the vanishing point, all those people 35 and below at the time of the start of the phaseout program, and many of their children, would painfully learn the meaning of having to pay off a national debt. For the financial obligations incurred under Social Security and Medicare are in fact an enormous national debt. They are an enormous national debt incurred to elderly and infirm people incapable of caring for themselves. People incapable in large measure simply because they had been promised that the government would care for them and thus that it was not necessary for them to save.
..
..From its inception in 1935 to the present day, the Social Security system, reinforced by Medicare since 1965, has served both to undercut people's motivation to provide for old age and retirement by means of saving and also, as the taxes to finance these programs have increased, their sheer ability to do so. Thus more and more of the savings and capital assets accumulated in the past have been lost.
One can see the effects of this decumulation in the withering of the industrial base of the United States and in the accompanying dramatic decline of formerly major centers of production, such as Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis. The wealth that was once present there has disappeared, sucked up into the voracious consumption of the government, under the leadership of ignorant, dishonest, and vicious politicians and officials.
- George Reisman,
How to Eliminate Social Security and Medicare, April 08, 2011</blockquote>