What Social Security needs is a policy of year by year monitoring. On balance both Shortfall and Depletion have been pushing back in time, the latter at a rate of more than a year per year. The reason is pretty simple, the economy has been outperforming the forecasts and given how dismal those numbers are can be expected to continue. At this rate any amount of Real GDP above 2.2% medium to long term backfills the entire projected gap. Nobody has made a principled case of why we can't grow at the rate needed.