Before you answer that question, consider what Mark Hulbert, columnist for MarketWatch, has to say:

The future is unknowable, and uncertainty can certainly be scary. But in a ranking of things to worry about, I would place a number of other uncertainties far higher than whether Social Security “will be there for me.” How will the stock market perform over the next few decades, for example? Is much higher inflation about to rear its ugly head? Where are interest rates headed?

The impact of a wrong answer on any of those questions is definitely something worth worrying about.

In the meantime, it’s simply not accurate to say there is a Social Security crisis, in the sense of “a sudden change” or a “turning point,” to quote the standard dictionary definitions of crisis. There is nothing about Social Security’s finances today that hasn’t been known for decades.

In fact, Andy Landis, author of “Social Security: The Inside Story” and a former Social Security Administration representative, tells me that in 1983, after the last time Congress made changes to Social Security’s funding mechanisms, its actuaries projected that the system would be able to meet all obligations until the mid-2030s. So it’s hardly a surprise to “discover” today what has been known for four decades. There’s no more of a Social Security funding “crisis” now than at any point since the mid-1980s.

It is true that, unless further funding changes are instituted, the Social Security trust fund will need additional funding in 2034. Note, however, that this prospect is analogous to the situation that faced Social Security in the early 1980s; like now, for many years before then, projections had shown that the system would eventually run out of money. The 1983 amendments to Social Security, which resolved the funding shortfall, weren’t finally approved until just four months before when the system would otherwise have run out of money.

There’s more sound thinking in Hulbert’s column — read the whole thing here.