ah, good correction, that's why the self employed hate them, they have to pay both halves.

the main reason for the distaste is that self-employed people generally fall in the class of people who do a better job preparing for retirement, and the govt old age/retirement systems are not intelligently run, it's more like "money under the bed" that gets raided to pay the current generation of old people rather than being saved not saved for the future. That same money in a private insurance account would offer the better returns as investment accounts do.

the reason the retirement funds are set to go bankrupt is that there are a lot of baby boomers. This is not the baby boomers fault, when govt retirement programs were set up back in the depression era, it gave pension eligibility to people who had not paid into a retirement system, paid for by current workers, and that can kept getting kicked down the road. I don't think anybody wants to see penniless old people, they simply want a government that plans ahead and doesn't keep kicking the can down the road, and doesn't raid pension monies to use as "free money" to pay for other government pork.