Of course it can. It has before right here.
Too bad people today think they should have everything given to them
Uh, guy, the 19th Century was a shit sandwich for most Americans, even most of the white ones. They didn't have to worry about retirement because most of them didn't live long enough TO retire. The One Percenters in the Gilded Age usually worked them from Childhood to death.
Just because you have some delusions that your 800 SF business puts you above the people who work for you, the vast majority of us don't want to go back to that.
Now we do have some problems, of course. Most of them caused by the 1%ers who sent all the good paying jobs to China, so we dont have the revenues coming in, and George W. Stupid looting the lockbox so he get back at Saddam for humiliating his father.
On a larger scale, of course, when the average life expectency goes from 62 as it was in 1935 to 78 today, we do have to be more creative in how we manage the safety net.
But we still need a safety net.