One of the most common claims in debates over Social Security is that the program’s financing problems could be solved simply by eliminating the payroll tax cap and applying Social Security taxes to all earnings.
Let me frame this differently. Currently we expect to not be able to pay full benefits by 2032. How many more years will this be pushed back if we remove the tax cap? I submit that that’s a better question than the percentages you list.
Initial investments are more trivial than ever. Trust Fund babies (most ever!) are born buying ADDITIONAL STOCK! Institutional investors are bigger than ever, too, especially index funds.
Absurd defense of the wealthy, as funny as fatally-flawed Malthus defense for not helping the poor. Prior adjustments of Social Security funding addressed far-nearer term "crises," such as after Indexing SocSec payouts + 14-year highest inflation rates + supply-shock growth stagnation + double-dip worst recession since Depression. Why choose 75 years? Why not 750 years? No way we can project birth rates, life expectancies, productivity rates without huge margins of error! Why create panic when Senior CONTROL ELECTIONS, and control with INCREASE! With 18 months of Trump, we saw defunding disease control, FEMA, research, Global Warming policy and ending illegal immigration (payroll taxed), unfunded spending of many trillions, it makes Social Security a far less present danger than funding a corrupt government, wars of choice, rolling pandemics, scrapping coastal city infrastructure (from rising sea levels), wildfires that create their own weather, etc. Moreover, the U.S. has a REVERSE ROBIN HOOD public pension system on Earth (working poor payroll taxes "pay-go" transferred to longest-lived senior with most of the wealth; manual labor folks everywhere get to retire at 55-60 (here, they never can retire); seniors RAID half of all Medicaid (for the poor) to fund all their nursing home costs (by deliberately impoverishing themselves to qualify as "poor"). Meanwhile, most "income" of the wealthy is UNREALIZED capital gains, so never taxed (even at death, bequeathed in Trust Funds).
Let me frame this differently. Currently we expect to not be able to pay full benefits by 2032. How many more years will this be pushed back if we remove the tax cap? I submit that that’s a better question than the percentages you list.
Initial investments are more trivial than ever. Trust Fund babies (most ever!) are born buying ADDITIONAL STOCK! Institutional investors are bigger than ever, too, especially index funds.
Absurd defense of the wealthy, as funny as fatally-flawed Malthus defense for not helping the poor. Prior adjustments of Social Security funding addressed far-nearer term "crises," such as after Indexing SocSec payouts + 14-year highest inflation rates + supply-shock growth stagnation + double-dip worst recession since Depression. Why choose 75 years? Why not 750 years? No way we can project birth rates, life expectancies, productivity rates without huge margins of error! Why create panic when Senior CONTROL ELECTIONS, and control with INCREASE! With 18 months of Trump, we saw defunding disease control, FEMA, research, Global Warming policy and ending illegal immigration (payroll taxed), unfunded spending of many trillions, it makes Social Security a far less present danger than funding a corrupt government, wars of choice, rolling pandemics, scrapping coastal city infrastructure (from rising sea levels), wildfires that create their own weather, etc. Moreover, the U.S. has a REVERSE ROBIN HOOD public pension system on Earth (working poor payroll taxes "pay-go" transferred to longest-lived senior with most of the wealth; manual labor folks everywhere get to retire at 55-60 (here, they never can retire); seniors RAID half of all Medicaid (for the poor) to fund all their nursing home costs (by deliberately impoverishing themselves to qualify as "poor"). Meanwhile, most "income" of the wealthy is UNREALIZED capital gains, so never taxed (even at death, bequeathed in Trust Funds).