Opinion by Ramesh Ponnuru: A Social Security crisis is a terrible thing to welcome
You don’t have to share conservatives’ strong preference for low tax rates to consider this unwise. The opportunity costs should make liberals balk, too. This gargantuan tax increase would do nothing to advance any other potential government priority, from bringing children out of poverty to fighting climate change. Medicare would still need fixing — and Social Security would still have most of its shortfall.
It’s the automatic growth of benefit levels, not just the aging of the country, that has made Social Security more expensive. A middle-income worker who retired in 2000 gotin today’s dollars. The program as currently designed is supposed to give his counterpart who retires in 2035 roughly $30,600. Over the same period, the maximum benefit level will go from $52,845 to $75,381.
Many Americans believe that Social Security merely gives them back what they paid in, but that’s a myth. The program’s actuaries estimate, for example, that a one-earner couple who made a medium wage and then retired in 2008 will getWhich is lovely. But the only way to keep benefits for the middle class and upper middle class growing so fast is to tax them more while they’re working.
An alternative would be to limit benefit growth so that tomorrow’s retirees get the same monthly payments as today’s, plus inflation. That would be a “cut,” but only from future benefit levels that we have made no provision to pay for. It would not be a cut from today’s benefit levels. It would fillThere is, however, one more alternative.
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