Can we just take a moment to freak out about how, when we were kids, seven or eight or something like that, our schoolteachers or the news or our mothers explained Social Security to us and we formed a small working knowledge of how America would help us take care of ourselves, a feeling of security because we would work hard and contribute a bit of our earnings every time we got a paycheck and in turn, we’d have a little something — nothing insane, mind you, but a little something — coming our way when we grew too old to work and now we’re expected to just roll over and accept that we’ve been paying into a system that will go bankrupt by 2037, a system that gives 12.4 percent of our paychecks to people who invested just 6.5 percent of their own, a system we fuel without hope that we’ll reap its benefits. Does that warrant freaking out?
