> Instead, end that system and start saving for your own retirement.
I mean we created the current system because people don't. And when they don't you end up with huge amounts of elderly eating cat food and otherwise starving in the streets. Oh, and old people vote, so good luck just getting rid of that.
It's very easy to mandate a portion of each paycheck goes into retirement accounts, just like existing systems. There can be allowances, boosts etc for edge cases, that come out of the current yearly budget of the government.
The problem comes in switching from one system to the other.
Yes, it will be costly. But so will the coming insolvency of the older systems that took a great shortcut.