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You can’t even pay people to have more kids
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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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I know no one likes maintenance, but it's necessary. We reformed social security in 1981. We can do it again now, and we can do it again before 2054. I'd propose eliminating the taxable income cap and means testing benefits before we think about raising the rates or the retirement age again.
Social Security keeps over 20 million people out of poverty. Frankly, I don't give a shit about what's better for people who've had the means and the opportunity to save for retirement independently (of which I am one). We're talking about people who don't have enough to begin with. If you eliminated social security, assuming employers didn't just pocket the 6.2% and passed it on to their workers, the working poor would use that money for sustenance, not savings.
To be clear, I'm not actually against removing the cap, means-testing the benefits, or anything else. However, the political will for that sort of thing isn't really there, especially because it would represent a non-trivial tax increase on the kind of upper middle class vaguely moderate suburbanites that tend to swing elections.
My main qualm is that Social Security simultaneously attempts to be a mandatory government retirement plan and a welfare system and doesn't do a particularly good job at either of those things. As a retirement plan, pretty much any generic investment plan outperforms it, while at the same time, its ability to be an effective elderly welfare system is hugely hampered by this political perception of it as an "earned" retirement benefit as well as its less than efficient administration.
My main point here is that it's not accurate to say that there's just "one weird trick!" that cleanly solves Social Security forever. Even raising or eliminating the cap would come with very significant political pushback from an annoyingly important and temperamental voting block.