Is there a solution to this "problem" that doesn't involve taking the hard-earned wealth away from people 55 and older who carefully planned and saved so they can enjoy themselves?
We have propaganda about things like this, but direct observation has been made over a number of decades and today's 55 year olds who will one day start collecting Social Security Retirement and/or begin benefitting more from their health insurance than they are paying in, are still not behaving very differently than 55 year olds at the time going back quite a bit into the previous century.
These are the 55 year olds who are still paying in to their respective Social Security and insurance plans, otherwise they would not be the ones that will receive significant benefits later.
Of course eventually as each individual reaches 65 and is eligible for full benefits, the true actual worth and buying power of those benefits has always been gradually declining.
To the point where you might have been better off without having these earnings immediately removed from your pay right off the top all along by the enforcing authorities.
And without having any need for a Social Security number.
The fundamental flaw with our Social Security is that the entire bureaucracy, infrastructure, business cash flow, collections & distributions is based on taxes on income rather than commerce.
Like a lot of things, but with SS it's even worse since only the lowest-income workers have their entire income taxed. As higher-earning pay levels are achieved, a decreasing percentage of earned income is taxed for SS purposes.
Regardless, with SS as one of the UBI systems with proven long-term functionality, it's too bad the full untaxed BI is still only universal for the 65 & over paid members in good standing, and only if they actually quit earning other income and truly retire.
And too bad it's not enough for a senior citizen to live on, so it's not up to quite basic levels but it's something.
This is because there are bigger tentacles that have been reaching into your pockets during your working years starting decades earlier in the 20th century than the FICA has been doing it.
If you do the math considering these resources, there is no excuse for not having gradually extended full benefits to much younger ages in a direct march toward full UBI. These have been the most highly productive hard working people in the most prosperous country in the modern history of my home planet.
Same with Medicare, it could have gradually reduced age of eligibility and achieved higher levels of health coverage for a more universal portion of the citizens far ahead of any less propsperous nation.
This all would have only required that an affordable portion of the resources were invested wisely to the advantage of the citizens from the outset, and only somewhat wisely at that. Markets can do amazing things, enough wealth was removed from working citizens before Nixon to have been leveraged to full UBI sometime between then & now, even using a no-brainer approach.
And when there's no excuse, you tend to get a lot of propaganda.
Even if you work for Apple, be careful about reality distortion effects.