It's not enormously different from other programs like Social Security. No one I know of lives in fear of the Social Security Administration. Do they have some power and need to be watched? Sure, but it's not some distopian nightmare.
I see a critical difference: social security is not paid to a majority of eligible voters and the funding is being taken from a majority of workers. That combination provides critical controls against the benefit levels rising (or being promised to rise) without check.
The AARP is a wildly powerful lobby, well out of proportion to the number of their members. People don’t live in fear of the AARP, I agree, but you might ask where does that power originate?
How do you possibly enforce that while things become ever more centralized and automatized. We are already losing to those in power and we are not even a tenth of the way there. E.g. there has been a massive decline of applications of anti-trust laws.
