Don't listen to the doomsayers: Social Security is healthy today, and the U.S. is rich enough to improve it — if the wealthy pay their fair share.
The annual report lent urgency to a raft of proposals to “fix” Social Security. Most such proposals amount to benefit cuts; that would be the result of steps such as raising the retirement age, reducing payments to wealthier recipients, gutting cost-of-living increases and recalculating lifetime earnings.
First, let’s examine the implications of the one-year change in the year of projected trust fund exhaustion. As Kathleen Romig, the Social Security expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,: “A year’s worth of fluctuation in the reserve depletion date is not a cause for alarm — or celebration, if it goes the other way!”
Big changes come from the system’s estimates of inflation, productivity, birth rates and other demographic factors. The trustees are projecting higher inflation, lower production output and lower birth rates over the next decade and the 65 years beyond. But those estimates are based partially on snapshots of current conditions, so they’re obviously conjectural.
That implies that workers are almost duped into filing for Social Security, when they would be so much happier staying on the job. The latest iteration of this idea is being formulated by a group of senators led by Bill Cassidy and Angus King .Republicans say Biden is lying about their intention to cut Social Security and Medicare. The evidence backs him up.