NOTHING can help Social Security if the government doesn’t first stop spending the money that SS collects and start investing it instead.
Whether bringing more payers of any kind into the system, or collecting more from each payer, the result is the same: it is just more “green blood,” drawn and spilt. That might help boost general revenue in the present, but at what cost later?
And, any such a plan would mean many more SS beneficiaries down the road. Adding beneficiaries CAN’T possibly help an already strained system. If the money won’t be there for the folks already in the system, it won’t be there for an even larger number - in spades.
I agree.
Actually there is a conservative version of this argument, that SS would be saved were it not for abortion
The Social Security Trust Fund should be separated out and the $2.2T IOUs paid off with new publicly traded Treasury Notes. Then the SSTF can go its own way and invest as any real pension fund would.
That would make all the national debt visible in one spot and end all the confusion about the SSTF “lock box”, “on budget vs. off budget”, etc.
The SSTF investing in world markets could reasonably expect a better return than the average 5.25% paper returns on the IOUs. At the same time, the Treasury could expect to pay less than 5.25% to those people that want/need less risk than the SSTF can afford. We’d be saving $25B/yr in interest on the national debt and the SSTF would grow $50B/yr faster than it would holding IOUs.