You've had periods where the Democrats control the Presidency, they control the House, and they control the Senate. If it is so easy to fix, why wasn't it fixed?
The answer is that it is not easy to fix, fixing it involves raising taxes, and people don't like taxes.
We’ve also had periods where Republicans controlled Congress and the Presidency, and they didn’t “destroy” Social Security like we’re told they would.
It’s a difficult problem to fix, and I suspect some politicians prefer the status quo so they can use it as a wedge issue. (as you see in the comments here)
Actually, the tax limit has been risen a few times, I remember when it was ~68000 and then it ended up being ~98000 in the late 90s, maybe in the Clinton Admin.
I think it is now ~163000, I can only assume that that was done by Obama.
In today's environment, as you say, I doubt it will be raised until 2/3 of the Senate and the Pres wants to raise it.
The social security tax limit is indexed with inflation and updated annually by the IRS without an act of congress. This indexing is factored into their funding calculations.
Giving up is the cowards route. How do we figure out what to do?
It's only a "ponzi scheme" because of hard to guess demographics. It requires help & correction I'm my view. It's bleak sad & vicious anti-human nihilism to "give up". That feels low, cruel, and an unimaginable horror to me. Giving up & doing nothing is an opting for unimaginable brutal cruelty & suffering. How can I even start to sympathize with that?
It's a ponzi scheme structurally and independent of demographics, this is tautologically true given the definitions of how these systems work and what Ponzi scheme means. Ponzi schemes don't only become so when they go deep into the red, they are Ponzis right from day one if they work by paying out early investors from the fees paid by later investors.
Giving up in this context means switching to a better system, not doing nothing. It's a really bad habit of political debate to assume that if the government provides a service, only the government can provide that service and anyone who criticizes their bad provisioning is therefore arguing for no service to exist at all (and therefore that they must be inhumane and evil). It's just a cheap and nasty debating tactic that you should avoid. "Giving up" means simply for all pension and social insurance to be managed by the private sector. Governments could maybe mandate you buy a policy, and they'd still regulate the private investment funds, but that'd be the limit of their involvement.
The advantage is that governments are much better at enforcing rules on companies than their own departments. There are lots of rules governing how investment capital is managed if you're in the private sector, but if government run pension funds were companies the management would all have been put in jail decades ago, and the Justice Department would be crowing about how it had protected vulnerable citizens from them. Keeping capital savings and management in the private sector (which is good at it) and rule enforcement in the government (which is good at it) would result in a fairer and more trustworthy system over the long run.
I'm in the U.S., but I stopped paying attention to national news years ago when I realized how much of a waste of time it is to worry about things I can't change when I have a hard enough time living consistently with my own values day in and day out.
It wasn't 40 years ago, though, and I don't remember having seen any actual efforts to destroy SS from either party. I've seen both sides refuse to try certain things to save it, but I don't remember anything I'd have called an attempt to destroy it.
I guess it depends on your definition of "destroy Social Security", but mine would include the efforts by Republicans to privatize it during the George W. Bush administration.
Republicans despise anything socialist, and Social Security is that. Unfortunately, the program is too popular to cut, but they are looking at the funding crisis as an opportunity to at least scale it back. Social Security needs additional funding, not benefit cuts.
> Moreover, Americans are willing to pay more to keep Social Security strong. About 8 in 10 (77%) say it is critical to preserve Social Security even if it means increasing the Social Security taxes paid by working Americans. An even higher percentage (83%) say it is critical to preserve Social Security even if it means increasing the Social Security taxes paid by wealthy Americans.
NASI is the National Academy of Social Insurance, which doesn't mean their results are wrong but does mean you'd need to pay very close attention to what they're doing in these surveys.
For example, they list reasons their respondents give for supporting social security and the first is "I know that I will be receiving benefits when I retire", but the point of the story we're commenting on is that they don't know that. They've been told that, and it might be true, but on the current trajectory it's not currently going to be true. If the NASI told them that social security was unsustainable, that their money being paid in wasn't being saved for them and they might well have fewer benefits than they expect or that seem fair, would they still agree?
I think they addressed that by including the word "preserve," however the PDF summary of one of the reports[0] makes that explicit:
> Six in 10 respondents (62%) say they are not confident about the future of the program. Among those not receiving Social Security benefits, 68% lack confidence they will receive all of their earned benefits.
The report goes on to detail how people believe social security is far worse off than it actually is (likely, IMO, due to fearmongering from one particular side.)
I know you don't know me personally, but I don't want it. Living off of my children's labors feels deeply icky to me unless they offer their support willingly, especially when they're at the time in life that they most need to be investing in themselves and I've already had the opportunity to do that.
Removing the income limit without increasing the benefit amount (at least not at the same rate) would be a huge improvement and should be about as simple as any tax change can be.
