Governments default on their own bonds often enough. Cf. Argentina plus a whole slew of third-world countries. I'll skip the theory and offer a single data poi

Governments default on their own bonds often enough. Cf. Argentina plus a whole slew of third-world countries. I'll skip the theory and offer a single data point: the employees of the Social Security Administration do not, themselves, use or pay into SS. Neither do any other US Government employees. That is, the people who know the most about the system think it's so good that they don't want any part of it. It's almost like they know something some of us don't.