In the Washington Post, Robert Kuttner claims that Social Security has no big solvency problem.

The Congressional Budget Office puts the 75-year shortfall at only about one-third of 1 percent of projected gross domestic product.
Social Security is financed by taxes on wages — and since the mid-1970s, wage growth has stagnated. If median wages rose with productivity growth, as they did during the first three decades after World War II, Social Security would enjoy a big surplus.

That CBO estimate assumes that Bush tax cuts that Democrats generally say they want extended will not be (see box 1 here). It also assumes higher wage growth than other forecasters consider prudent. Over the long run, higher wage growth does not actually do much to improve Social Security’s solvency, because higher wage growth increases future benefits as well as future revenues. Within any arbitrarily-defined period of time, however, higher wage growth makes the numbers look better, because the higher revenues come in before the higher benefits go out.

It may not be wise to bank on faster wage growth as a solution to Social Security, since it is not obvious how to bring about that faster wage growth. A major reason wage growth has not been tracking productivity growth is that health-care costs have taken up a larger and larger share of total compensation. Arresting that trend will require more than a magic wand, and some methods of arresting it might not be, on balance, salutary.