” In that case, people are not paying a contribution to fund their benefits”

To some extent they surely are because:
a) Nobody get zero who pays in – unless you die young of course.

b) There is little guarantee that any particular person will be a high earner over the course of their working life as markets change and old skill become obsolete.

So you have a safety net program rather than one that overtaxes in order to overspend on people who don’t actually need the money.

1) Life time high earners wouldn’t get nothing. Even high earners have things go wrong for them sometimes so they would be entitled to some benefit as an emergency measure. They would just get somewhat less than those with lower life time earnings.

2) I picture these reforms being phased-in for future retirees (some plans include faster phase-ins.) This would offer people a deal. You can either pay a lot more taxes during your working life (when you might or might not be a life time high earner based on a lot of factors), and retire to an unreformed system in a poorer America, or you can pay lower taxes during your working life and if you make a lot of money during your working years you will get a somewhat lower benefits when you retire.

This of course not getting into the idea that most people who make it to retirement will draw more in benefits than they pay in etc. since it wouldn’t effect current retirees. I have sympathy for current retirees who reject that argument for three reasons:

1. They did plan their retirements around the current system.

2. They feel like they can’t go back to work and support themselves so that any argument that protects their benefits will do. Who was it that said that you can’t convince somebody when their paycheck depends on their not being convinced?

3. They are trying to maintain a sense of dignity in the face of arguments than make them feel like moochers when they only spent their lives following the rules.

Far better would be to focus all attention on the new Treasury Secretary, and make it clear that no one with such a resume based on pure cronyism and the Wall Street-DC axis will be tolerated for such a position. Now THAT’S a battle that might be winnable, and even if they didn’t prevail, some points might be scored.

The country-club GOP is massively implicated in all of this, of course. Romney personified the worst possible image the GOP could have put forward. Yeah, all the other candidates running against him were jokes, but man, oh man, was he a terrible, terrible, terrible candidate, as I said over and over last year.