Some no, but maybe some yes. For instance, the US Government takes a big chunk of my salary out for FICA. For the OA (old age) part, i.e., social security, the government is more of less forcibly taking my wages to fund their approved savings account. I have no say in the matter. I would prefer to take my wages and control my saving myself. Now, I could choose to not pay, but what would happen to me then? Well, I'd be put in jail. One definition of government is an entity with the power to force an individual to comply at the threat of force.
As for Social Security (and Medicare), what is really going on isn't that "I'm funding my future savings or medical care" it's more that "I'm funding someone else's savings and medical care with the hope that in the future, another generation will fund mine" (and based on the actuarial models these were built on, those assumptions they had aren't necessarily the way things are now, especially demographically)...
and spent another $263B on interest expense for a total of $2.903T already spent before Congress did anything. Since we only brought in $3.32T in tax receipts, there was only $417B to run the ENTIRE government without running a deficit. So, of course, we ran a pretty large deficit. To change that, you need to raise taxes $1T/year, cut entitlements by $1T/year, do some of each, or grow the economy to take in more tax receipts, and/or encourage inflation that reduces the load of the debt and the cost of the entitlements subtlely. No party and really no person has the political will to do any of those things, so we nip around the edges at best. But, we've done that for decades (pretty much since we signed in the entitlement spending without adequately estimating its true costs and loads)...bills are just finally coming due...
