[jdasdf]

>Well, the current situation is equally effectively unfunded because you’ve got gains in an investment account that will be competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population in concert with large amounts of voters who don’t have investments but have a vote to vote for someone who will increase taxes to increase benefits. Pick your illusion of generational contract and financialization performance art.

You seem to have a serious misunderstanding of what the current situation is.

There is no "gains in an investment account" because social security is unfunded, and has only vestigial investments (many of which are primarily fig leaf to finance the government at lower costs/lower returns).

There won't be any "gains in an investment account that will be competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population" because there fundamentally aren't any gains.

Now, assuming that your misconception was correct, and that there was a pot of unrealized gains to be consumed when you retire... That still wouldn't cause any "competing for a rapidly shrinking working age population" because the thing about having resources is that you can spend them to get more of the things you need. Sure a large influx of capital requiring some specific goods or services would increase the price of those things... which would in turn increase the incentive to provide more of those things.

Frankly that isn't an issue if it's fully funded.

> large amounts of voters who don’t have investments but have a vote to vote for someone who will increase taxes to increase benefits.

And this is the problem.

Theft and its normalization through political power is what causes the self-funded and fully funded model to fail, not anything inherent to it.

>Pensions are no more a Ponzi scheme than a capital market predicated on growth that will not occur due to structural global demographic dynamics.

There is nothing to capital markets that requires growth. Indeed historically it is the opposite, and investors tend to overpay for growth resulting in lower returns.