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The stupidest morbidly obese economist alive proudly quotes a blogger who quotes him being wrong about high productivity assumptions making the officially calculated Social Security unfunded obligation go away. Brad DeLong sez,

Faster productivity growth affects the cost of Social Security (initial benefits go up faster the faster is productivity growth). And it affects the revenues of Social Security (a richer economy pays more in Social Security taxes). But it affects revenues more.

The key is that the indexation of benefits after retirement to the price level, not the wage level, adds a wedge between Social Security's costs and its resources roughly equal to half of life expectancy at retirement times the trend productivity growth rate. Each 0.1 percentage point increase in the growth rate of productivity reduces the long-horizon Social Security deficit by approximately 0.1% of taxable payroll.... Real wage and productivity growth of 3.0% per year (as opposed to the 1.1% per year assumed by SSA) would wipe out the 75-year deficit.

The system's unfunded obligation is $13 trillion, and it arises almost entirely from the excess of promises made, minus taxes collected, from participants in the program already. For future participants, the present value of taxes and scheduled benefits are roughly equal. Faster growth would increase both the future revenues and the future benefits in approximately equal measure. The revenues would arrive before the higher benefits must be paid, so there's an illusory improvement if you use a flawed metric like 75-year actuarial balance which counts the inflow but overlooks the outflow, but the actual total deficit, which is on the books already, isn't really affected.

The idea that faster economic growth will eliminate unfunded liability is simply incorrect, as Jagadeesh Gokhale demonstrates in a definitive paper.

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