Well, the welfare state for most nations will suffer. The reason it's a massive sin to scale down is that with a scaled down economy you can't sustain the old without greater sacrifices by the young. So you need someone to pay the price and neither wishes to. For my part, I think. one way or the other my Millennial generation should probably give up the US welfare state. We can still save the next generations.

why not just eliminate the $170K payroll cap? that gets us most (certainly not all) of the way there.