There is no *it* to have paid into. *It* does not nor did it ever exist.
Congress has already ruled on several occasions that individuals have no
rights to SS funds outside of what Congress says they have at any particular
time. If people were deceived into thinking that there was an *it* that
they were paying into, that's regrettable. There are always deceivers among
us.
Nor is there any real weight to the argument that SS is essentially an
inter-generational agreement. Like slavery, there is no moral enforcement
of a one sided agreement, an agreement in which the one with the obligation
did not have part and party in forming and never agreed to.
My grandmother used to rehearse how her father (my great-grandfather) had
taken her aside when he was in his decline and said that she could let the
girl (she had two children, my father and my aunt) go - she was probably
going to marry some man who smoked cigarettes and so would not amount to
anything - but he instructed her to keep the boy (my father) with her. My
father left the farm when he was 16 to work in DC as a Western Union
delivery boy just before the war from which he went into the military.
Many years later my grandmother rehearsed that story and said in a kind of
'what might have been' regretful voice that she should never have agreed to
let my father join the military when he was 19 against her father's dictates
for what the next two generations were to do. The truth is that he was
going to do that anyway, no matter what his grandfather had said. People of
my great-grandfather's day really thought that as patriarch or matriarch
they could tell the next few generations what to do and they were under some
obligation to do it. SS is much like that. All the money that people "paid
into" ... "it" was spent on the people of their day. They have neither
the right nor prerogative no any practical means of insisting that
generations yet unborn will do their bidding.