General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Ultra Low Interest Rates A Threat To Social Security [View all]jeff47
(26,549 posts)The 1992 "doomsday" was used to push through the Greenspan commission's recommendations.
Fundamentally, the misunderstanding here is your belief that the trust fund is supposed to be permanent. It is not. It is supposed to be spent during the Boomers retirement. Since the vast majority of Boomers will be dead by 2034, it will have served its purpose.
The ongoing funding problem is a combination of two things:
1) The SSA uses a very pessimistic economic forecast when calculating this date. That's why the "run out of money" date keeps moving into the future. The economy isn't as bad as they forecasted, resulting in higher Social Security tax receipts.
2) Economic inequality means far less income is subject to Social Security taxes. We no longer have nearly as many well-paying non-service jobs in the country which would be 100% subject to Social Security taxes. Instead, we have absurdly wealthy people making more money, which is beyond the Social Security cap.
We don't need to fill the trust fund NOW to solve the ongoing funding problem. We need to raise the Social Security tax cap to keep up with what has happened to incomes in the last 60 years. And we can do that at a much later time, because raising that cap still works with the "two-generations-fund-a-third" system Social Security is designed around - no (significant) trust fund required because it raises enough money to cover expenses.
If we rush into fixing this now, we will have to do something that Republicans and conservative Democrats will vote for. That will mean cuts to Social Security payments, or adding something like means-testing that will be used to destroy the program.
It's a problem, but it is a problem we can wait to solve. And we should wait to solve it, because there will be a future environment far better suited to solving it.
As for DI, that's a problem created by Republicans in order to drive through cuts by explicitly disallowing shifting of money between the programs. They're looking to create a "failure" so they can destroy the entire program. Don't fall for it. Instead, fix the problem by going back to allowing transfers between the funds, and again really address it when our politics is not dominated by an insane party, and a party desperately trying to find common ground with that insane party.