- The case against taxing the wealthy to save Social Security.
- AEI’s budget projection: “We project that debt-to-GDP will be 135 percent in 2032 and 268 percent in 2052, compared to CBO’s 112 percent and 177 percent, respectively.
- Drugs to treat obesity and diabetes: “We estimate that net prices received by drugmakers are 48–78 percent lower than list prices… faced by some consumers.”
- Diabetes contributed roughly $296 billion to excess health care spending in 2023.
- Social Security replaces about 54 percent of the pre-retirement earnings of an average wage worker. (This is higher than what Social Security tells us.)
CRFB provides an online Social Security calculator to show the
effects of various policy changes: https://www.crfb.org/socialsecurityreformer/
A combination of:
(1) indexing retirement age to longevity,
(2) switching to chained CPI
(3) Increase combined payroll tax by 0.5 percent, to 12.9%
(4) subject 90% of wages to payroll tax
(5) calculate benefits based on the highest 38 years (up from 35)
…are enough to reduce the shortfall by 84 percent. This would delay trust fund depletion until 2054, followed by a benefit cut of around 5 percent. Personally, I wouldn’t want to see the shortfall reduced by much more than that. It would be better to run the trust fund down to zero and make it pay-as-you-go from that point onward, effectively nullifying unsustainable COLAs.