>How is social security adding to debt when its funded by payroll tax?

Simple - the payroll tax doesn't raise enough funds to cover the full cost of the program. Even if it did raise 100% of the needed funds, that's still money Congress cannot tax a second time. At the end of the day, the government has two buckets: income and expenses. It doesn't matter whether some of that income is called "payroll tax", and some of it is called "income tax". Every cent raised through a payroll tax, is a cent that cannot be raised through an income tax, and visa-versa.

>Replace Medicare and Medicaid with a socialised 1 payer system as it would be much cheaper.

Yet...none of the advocates of a socialized healthcare system have ever put forward a real bill that can be rated by the Congressional Budget Office. Instead, they put forward shell bills which importantly lack any funding mechanisms.

> The numbers I saw was that the current system costs 48t and 1 payer system would be 32t.

The current system is divided between public and private spending. Even if you could reduce the overall cost to 32T, that's still a net cost increase on the public side. How will the government raise that money? The advocates for social healthcare never say.

I mean it ran at a surplus for 30 years until 2009 when boomers started retiring, still has over 3T in assets. How can you claim it's adding to the deficit?

If it's removed and replaced with nothing do you just let old people die in the streets? Or did you want to keep the tax but stop paying out? I don't see how the outcome is different then.

Increase income tax on the wealthy? It's not hard, you used to do it.

>I mean it ran at a surplus for 30 years until 2009 when boomers started retiring, still has over 3T in assets. How can you claim it's adding to the deficit?

It takes money from the general fund in the form of interest payments. And the CBO assumes that when the 3T in assets run out in about ten years, there will be some kind of continuous bailout whereby money from the general fund is used to plug the shortfall.

>If it's removed and replaced with nothing do you just let old people die in the streets?

You don't have to remove it entirely. You could implement means testing so that only those who truly need it receive money.

>Increase income tax on the wealthy? It's not hard, you used to do it.

It wouldn't generate enough revenue. Social Security and Medicare, and their associated interest payments are expected to run a ~100T deficit over the next 30 years. If you want to go the "just raise taxes" route to bridge that, you'll have to raise taxes on everybody. If you doubled middle class taxes and implemented a 20% VAT, it might raise enough to stabilize social security and medicare. But that would be the largest tax increase in American history, and Americans would receive no new benefits in return.