link here to article
Robert Reich, a former Social Security trustee, explains why the 1983 fix to Social Security no longer works. It is due to the rising share of income going to those whose wages exceed the payroll tax cap. Raising the payroll tax cap to reflect the shift in wages is all that is needed to keep Social Security tax receipts in line with payouts.
Reich is correct in his analysis but one of the problems is that government has been borrowing the Social Security tax surpluses that it has collected since 1983, and it owes the SS Trust Fund trillions of dollars. Paying off that debt adds to US deficits rather than reducing them as it has done in the past. In a sense there is no SS Trust Fund. It consists of Treasury Bills and interest on the Treasuries that have been spent on other government programs.
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