Very Good Article About Saving Social Security

Their prescription:

"To address these issues, policymakers should enact a 2016 package developed by a Bipartisan Policy Center commission (of which I was a member). The plan would raise the payroll tax cap substantially, raise the payroll tax rate by 1% over 10 years for both employees and employers, and increase the income taxation of Social Security benefits for high-income households. It would change the way Social Security calculates inflation to better reflect price changes. To encourage people to work longer, the full retirement age would rise by one month every two years starting in 2022 until it reaches 69 in 2070."

"Social Security is drying up. This plan could save it,"
By William G. Gale for CNN Business Perspectives

Updated 9:23 AM ET, Sat April 27, 2019


 You can come up with your own plan on the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget website 
http://www.crfb.org/socialsecurityreformer/ . Play with the factors below and you will be amazed how easily you could solve the funding problem, and how easily Congress could do so, if they only had the political will.

  • Adjusting the retirement age.
  • Adjusting the taxability of the SS benefits for higher income recipients.
  • Changing the inflation factor to better reflect the basket of goods seniors purchase.
  • Raising the payroll tax cap ($132,900 in 2019).
  • Raising the SS tax rate.
Very small tweaks in each of the factors, so no one is hurt very much, can solve the problem. 

But, what all this misses is the opportunity to expand the number of people paying the tax that could be realized by increasing the number of highly qualified immigrants (or even more guest workers for laborers) allowed into the USA. 

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