Social Security will hit a funding shortfall in 2032, and if Congress does nothing, monthly benefits get slashed by 28% — just as the generation that was forced into a broken 401(k) experiment reaches retirement age with nothing left to fall back on.

This isn't a glitch. It's the bill coming due for decades of bipartisan looting. Every president and every Congress that raided the Social Security trust fund to finance pet projects, foreign adventures, and bridges to nowhere made a choice: they stole from the Americans who earned that money and figured the reckoning would land on someone else's watch. That reckoning is now.

CBS News spoke with Chris Branaman, a 53-year-old IT worker in Bay City, Michigan, who has about $100,000 saved in his 401(k). His retirement plan? "I will likely be working in retirement," he said — joking that he'll end up as a Walmart greeter. He's hardly alone. Gen Xers, now 46 to 61, entered the workforce in the 1980s and 1990s just as employers were killing pensions and pushing workers into 401(k)s. In the 1970s, about half of private-sector workers had employer-funded pensions. Today, only 14% do, according to CBS News. The entire risk was dumped on working people. As Branaman put it, the 401(k) was "perfect for our generation: Figure it out."

Now 41% of workers over 55 expect Social Security to be their primary retirement income — up from just 25% a year ago, according to an NFP survey. Jessica Espinoza, NFP's national practice leader for retirement, called the data "a warning light," telling CBS News this is the first cohort forced to rely on their own savings without pension plans. Social Security and whatever they scraped together will determine whether they can retire "on their own terms or not, and that's really daunting for that population."

USA Today, meanwhile, treated the crisis as a calendar item — noting the August payment schedule and burying the 2032 shortfall and 28% benefit cut several paragraphs deep. A Washington think tank proposed capping annual benefits at $100,000 to shore up the fund, USA Today reported. Notice what's never on the table: stopping the looting.

Social Security was designed to replace about 40% of a worker's pre-retirement income, one leg of a three-legged stool that also included pensions and personal savings. Both parties helped saw off the other two legs. Now they'll tell you the program needs "reform" — which always means benefit cuts or tax hikes on the people who paid in, never clawing back what was spent elsewhere.

The money that flowed out of this trust fund didn't vanish. It was spent — on everything from nation-building in countries most Americans couldn't find on a map to subsidies for industries that didn't need them. Every dollar sent overseas or flushed down some federal slush fund was a dollar stolen from the paychecks of people like Chris Branaman, who were told the system would be there when they needed it.

Gen X will be the first generation to fully absorb the scam: work until you die, because Washington already spent your retirement. The only question is whether anyone in either party will be forced to answer for it before the 2032 deadline arrives.