This should not be surprising to anyone. A system in which the government confiscates part of your earnings, promises to invest it and give it back to you when you get old by using other people’s money is what is known as a Ponzi Scheme. The problems with this scheme are numerous, including that the return on investment is a fraction of what any citizen could earn with conservative long term investing of their own money in the private sector and it ignores the first principle of Ponzi Schemes, namely expanding the pool of suckers paying into it.

It was a bad system to begin with and made worse by politicians kicking the can down the road instead of fixing it.