General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Ultra Low Interest Rates A Threat To Social Security [View all]jeff47
(26,549 posts)Fundamentally, Social Security works by taxing roughly two younger generations to fund retirement for a third, older generation. As long as each generation was larger than the previous, it worked fine.
Then GenX turned out to be much smaller than the Boomers.
So the Greenspan commission in 1983 was created. It recommended creating a large trust fund filled with excess payments by Boomers, GenX and now Millennials could fund the retirement of the Boomers. This fund was never intended to be permanent. It was always intended to be spent during the retirement of the Boomers.
And since Millennials are larger than GenX, Social Security should work during GenX's retirement just as Social Security worked before the Boomers. Whether or not that turns out to be the case will depend on the size of the generation after Millennials. And they're still being born.
We probably need to tweak the cap on Social Security taxes, because income inequality means Social Security taxes are not being paid on a very large amount of income these days. But we've got decades to get that passed, and any "fix" we pass in the near future would be severely harmed by Republican orthodoxy. We need to let the Republicans finish imploding, or we will get a "fix" that really hurts people.