Paying for Social Security using payroll taxes as we are currently doing seems like national suicidal, because younger families gain a greater share of their total income from working, rather than from holding land and investments.

Payroll taxes increase the effective tax burden on younger working families in their prime reproductive years, which means they can no longer afford to have the same number of kids, or to have kids as early. When younger workers are taxed, the less affordable it is to create new generations of younger workers, and fertility rates decrease.

The best thing the United States could do to address this would be to eliminate FICA \ self-employment taxes and fund social security out of a general income tax which taxed capital gains and dividends at the same rate as labor income. An even better solution would be fund it via a national real-estate property tax or national land value tax, and not to raise it from taxes on earnings at all, as Thomas Paine originally proposed in Agrarian Justice.