Social Security isn’t broken now (it owns trillions in US treasury securities remember?) and could coast along until something like 2034 before it starts to spend money it doesn’t have and add to the national debt,
@filmfann it’s an insurance program, not a mutual fund, or your retirement investment. It’s a floor for your prosperity, not pretending to be the whole amount of retirement resources. For the people who only have Social Security it is a lot more than nothing and helps them survive. A surprising number of people find themselves dependent on Social Security when they planned and expected not to. If you need it, it can be a life-saver.
Some people get a lot more out of the system than they could ever pay in, in particular disabled and spouse’s of primary wage earners. Some people like you and probably me, will be paying into it more than we might get out.
Yes, we participate in Social Security because we have to, the pooling of risk over a hundred million people allows that to be very efficient way of accommodating payments.
The premium is already ‘means tested’ in a sense. People who make more money paid in at a higher rate – up to the cap – and may get retirement payments at a higher rate too up to a modest limit. The cap is pretty low considerring the range of incomes paying into the system. Even if the cap were doubled to around ¼ million $ the viability of Social Security would be extended to a future point that’d ridiculous to worry about in the context of the current economy.
If you want a “forever” solution just remove the cap on income considerred for the Social Security premium.
This also presumes the federal government of the US does not intend to default on all or part of the 14 trillion $ debt accrued. Social Security’s chunk of the pie and its payments could shrink in value enough to change its nature.
Medicare is a distinct story. It’s glaring handicap is that it’s designed to most serve the people who are least able to pay for it, the retired elderly and disabled people. If Medicare included the entire population we would have a base for a very efficient world-class health care system for everybody. The only people feeling less well would be HMO/insurance companies who have inverted the priorities away from curing folks. With their ‘rents’ on premiums and gateway monopoly on payment/“coverage” they continue to take their tax for no value added.