Congress managed to come up with 8 trillion dollars for the Wall St bailout at the drop of a hat, and 3 trillion (and counting) for the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. On top of that, the US manages to spend more on its military than the rest of the world combined.
To say that it couldn't come up with the money to support its own citizens in their old age would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.
When you hear that statistic about two workers per retiree or whatever, don't just be thinking about money; that's the output of those two workers putatively going to support the retiree, and what's leftover going to power the economy.
As convenient as it can be to analyze problems in terms of money in normal life, when it gets to these really big "structure of society" problems the abstraction starts to get in your way again. Many of the characteristics of money are downright deceptive; one may save $100 today, but $100 of, say, corn today is not going to feed any retirees 20 years from now, it'll just be a rotted mess. Goods and services store poorly; they need to be matched up producer/consumer in something more like real time. Money is a great abstraction over that, but a still a secondary phenomenon compared to that real-time match up.
Of course, we can indeed support quite a few retirees... if one adjusts their standard of living down a long way. If it's OK for them to dial 911 and for nothing to happen, we've got more than enough wealth to support all kinds of retirees. Start specifying out a "good" first-world life style, though, and it becomes problematic again.
The problem is not, in absolute terms, a "lack of money"; the problem is that we've made promises about the quality of the retired life that are going to be very difficult to keep with small single-digit numbers of goods and service providers, while at the same time having enough of a productive economy to produce the wealth that will make it possible to keep those promises. Money is a very poor lens to analyze this problem through.
(Personally I don't believe the problem to be as hopeless as it seems, as there are still some avenues for significant per-worker productivity enhancements, mostly in terms of significant improvements in robotics. However, it must be observed that with our current set of promises, we 20-, 30-, and probably even 40-year olds are effectively all-in with our retirements on that hope, because if tech were to stagnate at current levels the current set of promises is probably mathematically infeasible.)
[1]: I'm not saying this is good or desirable, btw, it's just part of my point about this not being about money.
And the higher-level point is just that when it comes to this sort of big "how shall we structure society?" questions, thinking in terms of money affords bad logic. In particular, people can't resist straight-line interpolations based on current prices, as if prices don't change and we have an infinite pool of resources to draw on at unchanging prices, so it's just a matter of scaring up enough money. That works in your day-to-day life, it's not how it works at a societal scale.
Meanwhile, major entitlement spending (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, CHIP) accounts for 44% of the entire federal budget (total entitlements accounting for 62%) [2]. Total entitlements amount to $2 trillion in 2012, and increasing significantly faster than inflation every year.
[1] http://projects.propublica.org/bailout/ [2] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/10/federal-spe...
Do the math. It doesn't add up.
It is a matter of priorities, plain and simple. Just because it isn't a high priority for you doesn't mean it isn't a question of priorities.
Readers of this site should be keenly aware of these issues and what they're really about; we work in an industry with rampant age discrimination where people are encouraged to spend their early 20s working all night to make someone else rich, people routinely burn out before 30 ... do you expect to be pulling all-nighters at your Rails startup at 70? No? Then you should pay attention and get pissed off about this stuff.
Don't put priorities in my mouth.