Social Security’s Future–A Reality Check on the Unfolding Dilemma - Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget; AMAC
If you’ve been following the steadily unfolding solvency crisis facing our Social Security system, you’ve no doubt seen an equally steady stream of opinions on how best to address the situation. The Social Security trustees have been sounding the alarm for decades now, and many Congressional sessions have seen legislative proposals to attack various portions of the problem, but no overall solution has yet to achieve bipartisan acceptance. Meanwhile, the program’s trust fund reserves–which had built to a level just shy of the $3 trillion mark just a handful of years ago–continue to evaporate toward total depletion less than a decade from now.
So, the rhetoric continues, and perspectives continue to surface on the perils of ignoring the problem. Yesterday, on the Duluth News Tribune website, two officials from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (crfb.org) offered an analysis of how political positions espoused in the current presidential election cycle are unlikely to solve Social Security’s problems and called for re-focusing the conversation to “real solutions, not magical fixes or ignoring the problem.” Read the piece by CRFB’s senior vice president Marc Goldwein and policy director Chris Towner in full here.
What’s needed to achieve the “real solutions” is careful evaluation of proposals and bipartisan compromise, and this is needed quickly. The longer it takes to achieve a resolution, the more traumatic the “fixes” will need to be. Considering the future, keep in mind that the 118th Congress, like many of the preceding congressional sessions, continues to see proposals to reform Social Security in the face of the insolvency dilemma.
As an example of the leading thoughts on reforming Social Security, the Association of Mature American Citizens (AMAC, Inc.) believes Social Security must be preserved and modernized. This can be achieved without tax increases by slight modifications to cost-of-living adjustments and payments to high-income beneficiaries plus gradually increasing the full (but not early) retirement age. AMAC Action, AMAC’s advocacy arm, supports an increase in the threshold where benefits are taxed and then indexed for inflation, and calls for eliminating the reduction in people’s benefits for those choosing to work before full retirement age. AMAC is resolute in its mission that Social Security be preserved for current and successive generations and has gotten the attention of lawmakers in D.C., meeting with many congressional offices and staff over the past decade. To learn more about AMAC’s approach to resolving Social Security’s dilemma, click here.