Unless I'm reading this wrong, Max Sawicky and I agree.
Preemptive response to critics of SS: yes 1.3 or worse is a lousy rate of return. But in my reading of the social insurance lit, the implicit debt of SS is a fait accompli. There is no way on God's green Earth to avoid this result in a pay-as-you-go system where the economy grows more slowly than the rate of interest. That's not a great affirmation of the program, but if it's true, no privatization/reform scheme can avoid hammering somebody with the implicit debt of the system.
That was exactly my point here. But I've yet to hear an answer to the question I posed in that post: Given that a hammerin' is inevitable "in a pay-as-you-go system where the economy grows more slowly than the rate of interest," why the insistence on clinging to this hybrid forced-saving/redistributive system we inherited from the Great Depression?