7.65 not 6.75

Why should a dime more be devoted to this hugely flawed system?

And are you proposing that the FICA tax be doubled? That last paragraph doesn’t make any sense.

Can’t we have some real reform, like turning SS into a 401k system with personal accounts that the government can’t touch? I would be even willing to go 50/50, i.e. 50% into a personal account and 50% to support current SS recipients.

to amount paid in, adjusted for inflation, plus accrued interest based on average yield of 30-yr treasuries. People get a statement every year letting them know how much has been paid in on their behalf, and they can use that to plan retirement rather than having a set age that benefits can be drawn and they get that same amount for the rest of their lives. I would rather see it transform into a voluntary system that is managed like an insurance plan, and get rid of pay as you go because that’s where we’re getting fleeced by the politicians.

Disability needs to split out and privatized rather than raiding public retirement funds for it.

The truth is that if we want to save this stupid program then we will have to swallow all sorts of bad pills. Because, guess what? We are “efing” broke.

This is the one thing that makes me certain that our nation will indeed move in a libertarian direction in the coming years, not because libertarians were all that pursuasive, but because we just don’t have any money left.

Pursue rampant internationalism? we are broke, Continue a self destructive war on drugs? we are broke, Continue to hamstring business with mounting regulations, we are broke. Continue to meddle the federal government in state business? we are broke.

the answer to all questions is the same, we are goddamn broke!

Means testing, i. e. handing out benefits based on perceived “need” always involves moral hazard, meaning you are rewarding undesireable behavior and punishing desireable behavior , and it nearly always leads to outcomes that you hadn’t planned.

The problem is that wealthy people spend billions of dollars figuring out how to avoid taxes. And they are often very successful at it. Just a few ideas of how you can manipulate income: annuities and trusts. At present, trusts pay higher tax rates than beneficiaries of trusts so there is no incentive to try to retain income in the trust and tax it there instead of distributing it to beneficiaries. But if distributing income to beneficiaries means they will pay a 100% tax on the first 24,000 in income (which is just about max social security per year), then inventive people will start figuring out how to have the trust pay the tax. Annuties present another issue– return of capital is not taxed. Can you structure an annuity so that it pays out principal first and income later? I think so.

And I’m not even a tax attorney Once Social security payments are reduced by taxable income you will see a lot of manipulations going on and inventive people figuring out how to manipulate.

On the moral hazard side you are proposing that people who worked hard, invested and saved should have their social security benefits reduced to pay for people who didn’t work hard, invest and save.

If, indeed, benefits have to be reduced, why not reduce them across the board instead? It makes no difference to the tax burden.

Thw idea of “means testing” social security is just another tax the rich idea but it would have the unintended consequence of severely reducing any incentive for people to save for their future. Why give up today’s spending if the consequence is that the money you set aside will disqualify you for social security. Of course if you are a very high million dollar a year person, the amount involved in Social Security wouldn’t be enough to change your behavior, but if you are say, 50 and earning $75,-000 a year, why would you save if all that meant is that that money would be used to disqualify you for social security.

It is time to start thinking about posterity and not just our own posterior!