On one hand, you have Democrats saying “The Evil Republicans are coming for your social security! It’s your right! You paid into it!”
And on the other hand, you have a system where the money people paying in TODAY is going out to the people currently retired, and the number of Social Security recipients is rapidly going to outnumber the people paying into the system…and one solution to that is to….raise the age people take social security. (Let’s not complicate things with people living longer….when the retirement age was 62 and folks died younger…now you retire at 62 you could have 20-30 years ahead of you.)
Social Security, as currently constituted, is clearly insufficient (as are retirement savings even for those heavily invested in 401(k) plans which are really just instruments to force people to directly invest in the stock and bond markets), but the plan to make Gen X and Y people to work until the are ready to drop into the mulching pit as protein fodder for edible fungi is also less than palatable. This isn’t a Republican-created problem—the question of “What to do with Social Security” has been open since it was clear that ‘Boomers’ were having far less children than their parents, and Gen Xers even fewer and generally later—but the answer isn’t to just push it off to the next generation when the current Fox News demographic will be ensconced in their waterproof vaults six feet below mean sea level.
Frankly, we probably have much larger problems than just sustaining Social Security, but the inability to deal with even this relatively well-understood and tractable issue highlights how completely unprepared we are to cope with more fundamentally existential threats.
For years and years and years I’ve been hearing how we should remove the caps on the SS payroll tax. I still haven’t seen that happen. Every once in a while it gets bumped up a bit, but obviously not enough to fix the problem. (Not that I’m saying it would fix the problem by itself.)
The life expectancy for people in the bottom half of the income levels have not increased all that much. Basically, you’re saying that factory workers and laborers have to work longer because lawyers and doctors are living longer (stolen from the article linked below).
Here’s a gift article that discusses all of this in detail. There are no kernels of truth.
As I understand it, social security in the US is similar to the state pension in the UK. I mention this simply because state pension age in the UK is already in the process of being raised - it started in 2020:
Once state pension age for men and women has reached 66 [raised from 65] in October 2020 there will then be further increases. Pension age is set to increase from 66 to 67 between 2026 and 2028.
This was a helpful article. While more affluent people are living longer, I’d also suspect they need Social Security less. (We’ve got those horrible horrible awful 401ks…but they also seem to be doing okay as a retirement vehicle. There used to be better retirement options, but if you put in 10% for most of your career, they’re not awful. Likewise, I’m not looking to live on a cruise liner the rest of my retirement.)
People not living longer vs. People lost due to COVID vs. People taking Social Security/People paying into the system are all things that are good to hypothesize, but I’m not qualified to speak on the quantitative amounts.
I guess it remains to be seen what will actually happen, but it doesn’t feel like the math works out.
The other, more obvious, solution is to cut the benefits of people currently receiving them to the level that we collect in taxes. In 1985, the SSA began projecting the fund to run out of money in circa 2035. It hasn’t changed by more than a year here or there. Boomers never raised their own retirement age, nor did they increase the tax or cut the benefits. It’s time for them to reap what they sew.
Funny how after 30 years of turning a blind eye to the problem, suddenly once all the Boomers are retired, it’s top of mind, and the first suggestion out of the gate is raising the benefits age for everyone else. Naturally, not for themselves, of course.
I just got a raise yesterday. 3% of my salary. My wife got hers today. 2%. Boomers? 8.7%. High-ammonia bullshit right there.
It’s a fairly simple argument. You needed to pay more, you didn’t, so now you get less.
But then to be fair, you have to raise the max payout and you’re back at square one.
That’s true of literally any federal spending cut. You’re talking about removing money from people’s pockets. That by definition is impacting people. But it’s not an equal impact. If you cut benefits, then rich people will lose, say, $1000 and poor people will lose $500, for instance. You’re hurting the people with nest eggs more.
But again I say, they had 30 years to vote to raise taxes on themselves, and they didn’t. Time to pay the piper. But of course, that won’t happen, even though it should. You’ll never see Boomers vote themselves smaller benefits when they can always just pass the buck to the younger generations. I’m not foolish enough to think this ever would happen, even though any kindergartner could tell you you don’t steal from others. Boomers need to eat off their own plate.
All depends on your meaning of the word “fair”. If you mean “people who have more money should get to have even more money, because they could afford to pay more in”, then yes you’d have to raise the maximum payout.
If what you mean by “fair” is “everybody should have a chance at enough to at least minimally live on”, then no you don’t.
If you’re going to do that, may as well pull off the band-aid and just pay for SS out of the general fund (rolling the existing SS contributions into the current tax brackets). It was always an illusion, but removing the cap would eliminate the final pretense that you’re contributing toward your own retirement.
The Boomers aren’t one big monolithic blob. Take mine. She’s 80 and can’t afford to retire. Still workin 4 days a week. Ironically, I think her quality of life is higher, but that’s outside the scope.
You don’t have to remove the caps. You could just move them enough to make up for any projected income deficit.
As for moving retirement age, we’ve already done / already doing that. People a few notches older than me were allowed to retire at 60, got normal benefits if they worked until 65. I had the option of retiring at 62 (not 60), I get a bump somewhere along the line (65?) and get maximum benefits if I wait until 70 to retire.
Social Security is a vital part of the incomes of almost 67 million Americans, almost half of those it is their only income. How many of those would be added to the 1.5 million homeless in the US if a big part of their incomes go away? My uncle is one of those, any cuts and he won’t be able to afford his $700 a month rent on a dumpy mobile home. He says the ultimate humiliation of his current situation is using his EBT card to buy groceries. This is a guy that worked for 44 years for a large wood product company that was allowed to take away their former employees pensions to avoid bankruptcy. That same company made 2.6 billion in profits in 2021. I would bet the rich running that company will cry if they have pay more in taxes while still getting a pension worth millions.
Not true. I know several people who, when they started to work, were told they could collect full retirement at 65. That was changed over the years and it’s now approaching 67.
This and cutting benefits of those collecting falls under “changing the rules once the game has started.” And cutting the benefits for those collecting means some of those 65-year-old-plus people have to go back into the work force? Good luck to them!
So then yes, you’d have to raise the maximum payout.
That was ever a pretense? If that were the case, you’d see the current retirees voting to lower their benefits. Instead, you see the opposite. They’re saying they’re running out of money to take, so they need to get more from younger people. If they funded their own retirement, they wouldn’t be trying to do that. They’d say “Hey, I guess we didn’t contribute enough, did we?” and cut.
That was the Reagan administration who did that. Y’know, like from the history books?
