It’s easy for Biden to beat up on Repubs for saying SocSec needs a fix. It won’t go broke until after he’s President (even if 2025-2029). Next Prez’s problem.
Third rail - talk SocSec reform, lose the next election. Only two elected U.S. officials talked about a SocSec fix. Both were 2nd-term Presidents. (Obama was the latest. No comments from other Dems at the time.)
Reagan was in his first term when they rolled out a lot of changes that kicked the can quite a ways down the road. (Higher taxes, increase to SSNRA, taxing benefits, maybe more that I’m forgetting)
Sadly, nothing meaningful has changed since then.
Neither party has had the guts to get SS back on track in recent history. We need some real leadership here. Seems like both parties are content to let it continue to erode until the SHTF.
I don’t think anyone disagrees that it needs a fix. That’s not what got anyone in the GOP beat up. Calls to have SS sunset every 5 years and have to be reauthorized got attacked by both Dems and much of the GOP. Calls for big benefit cuts were also DOA for many on both sides of the aisle.
Sunsetting every five years would be a little more breathing room than having to re-authorize spending with every budget, which is the direction Congress is going if they’re not willing to increase taxes and/or cut benefits.
It’s not like the demographics are on the side of letting it ride, after all.
Just fix it. The 5 year sunset thing is a horrible idea for something that is supposed to be a long term social safety net. Letting SS be out of balance until it becomes an annual emergency budget debate is also a horrible idea.
Just fix it. It’s really not that complicated. There is a lack of political will from either party to do what must be done.
Perhaps we should begin by fixes to health care. While the boomers will have an impact on SS outlays, their effect is largely known. Most are already receiving benefits. Easy projections compared to Medicare costs.
And tackling Medicare will mean addressing the outrageous outlays today. Where are we now? Something north of 15% of GDP? That’s insane and way out of line with other comparable societies. Insane.
Looking down the road, it’s hard to imagine this figure getting smaller. Today’s working population is shockingly obese- right on down to kids under 16. It’s pretty clear that obesity has all sorts of bad health effects. So the retirees, born well after the boomers, are going to escalate those costs dramatically. Current CBO estimates look at changes in expenditures over 30 years. By 2052, the increase in SS is large. Something on the order of $1.5 trillion/ year. But the Medicare costs will increase 3 times that amount. That’s the low hanging fruit. Let’s stop making sick people and stop letting HC costs inflate at rates in excess of GDP growth.
I agree that Medicare’s need for a fix is even more urgent than SS, and also an area where both parties have proven to be gutless.
The bigger healthcare problem is much more complicated to address. I agree it should be tackled, but it’s much more difficult than SS or Medicare fixes.
Start small.
Go to your cupboard or cabinet and take a look at a few of the food labels where it shows the RDA %. Notice that you get info on calcium and vitamins, and a bunch of other items. Now look at sugar. Just grams. No RDA. How curious.
Last I checked, the RDA on sugar is about 15grams. A single 12oz can of soda has double that. God only knows what the amount in a supersized drink is. Ask why we are not informed. Tell you congresscritter you need the info. Tell him/her again and again.
It starts simple. Winning campaigns in history can be your road map. Tobacco, seat belts, DUI penalties, etc. Don’t sit back and wait for your rep to have an epiphany. And the industries will not become more sensitive to public health all by their own accord. Ain’t gonna happen.
Here’s a fun fact: 5% of land in the US is planted with corn. Not 5% of agriculture land. 5% of all land. That stat blew me away. Nature hates a monoculture.
The corn lobby is powerful. Simply ending subsidies for corn would be huge, but that’s an extremely difficult change.
The best way to “just fix it” is to get rid of it. It has a fundamental demographic problem.
I mean, you can turn it into a welfare program for old folks. That’s sustainable. But there’s really no good way to continue Social Security itself in its current structure. People are living longer & not having enough babies.
They need to cut benefits a lot and/or increase taxes to the point of breaking the tie between the taxes & the benefits.
You’re more likely to fix obesity this way than going after corn subsidies:
[note: this does not sound like a good idea to me, but who knows]… but that’s going to get waaaaay off topic
Getting rid of it completely would create even bigger problems, and there’s no way either party wants that.
We do have demographic problems like most of the developed world, but the fixes don’t have to be extreme. Per the Social Security game, removing the maximum on earnings but allowing for an increase in benefits fixes 71% of the problem. Raising the tax rate from 6.2% to 6.6% fixes another 28% of the gap. We haven’t made any benefit cuts yet, nor broken the tie between benefits and taxes and we are 99% of the way there.
Getting rid of SS does not address the underlying problem. Throughout antiquity there have been elderly and young. They are not as productive as fit adults. Living longer is something virtually all desire. It’s a good thing. The underlying problem will always be there. SS may not be perfect, but it is on the right path.
You seem to be completely ignoring the value of the disability insurance aspect of SS. How much would you have to have been paying on the open market for that no-underwriting coverage?
Let immigrants in. Most are young workers and kids. They’ll pay Social Security and Medicare taxes.
Agree that increases in immigration will improve the demographic situation.
True… Social Security disability and survivor benefits exist and pay meaningful benefits for the people who get them. It isn’t just old age insurance.
Do note that comparing the DI coverage to what you’d buy from an insurer for the same dollar amount of coverage is bad math though. Social Security has an extremely strict definition of disability so it’s basically not comparable to anything any disability insurer is selling. It’s very common for people to be on a disability claim for years through their disability plan with their employer or an individual disability policy, and Social Security will never approve them.
I think we assumed that something like 65% of long term disability claims would eventually be approved for Social Security… and that’s with the insurance company fighting to get the claim approved. So the insurer is approving on the order of 50% more claims than Social Security. I might not be remembering those numbers exactly right, but it was a sizable number at any rate that met the insurance company’s definition of disability and not Social Security’s.
Survivor benefits were operating on a closer definition to life insurance, but believe it or not, differences do exist on the timing of when a disappeared person is assumed to be dead.
Looks like the rest of the world is catching up to the US on the fatness scale: 50% of the world population is estimated to be overweight or obese in 12 years.
more evidence that american exceptionalism is waning. unless you view it from the lens of “they all want to be like us!”
The Academy revamped their Social Security game: