But on SS, look at what you buy, see where it is made. ALL those workers and their ‘employers’ do not pay SS. If SS was collected on these products, we would not be having SS problems. SS worked until we exported the jobs. American companies and their employees have to pay SS taxes, level the playing field. Put a SS tax on all imports.
Where are SS taxes from? They're from wages. They're not from tariffs, but from wages.
Are the number of people working now, earning wages, 1/7th of what they were back when Bloomberg was talking about it? That would require 7 times more unemployed people.
From a SS standpoint, it doesn't matter if your computer comes from Malaysia or Round Rock; your SS is paid by US workers working now. And there are still a bunch of them, and they are all paying SS.
What has happened, is the expense side of SS has dramatically increased - longer lifetimes, more people collecting (the baby boomer demographic bulge), use for novel benefits (survivor benefits, SSI and disability). We're spending a lot more on lots more things that SS wasn't supposed to pay for.
So, we're in a $20 trillion hole (and growing). It's not because there are so many fewer people working and paying taxes on their wages, it's because we're spending way too much.
Just like Washington in general; in constant dollars, the Federal Government is taking in the same as it did in 1998 (when the deficit was down in the $80 billion range). The problem is spending in those same constant dollars is up 50% - and so our deficit is way up.
We have a spending problem for Social Security, not a revenue problem. More workers today (because of a larger population) earning on average more dollars today than 20 years ago - but SS is going bust faster because it's paying out more than it is bringing it.
It's not the number of workers or where things come from that is this problem - it's that the program was set up as a Ponzi scheme from the beginning. The first to receive benefits never paid in; they received money from other workers. And so it's gone - every dollar you pay in now goes to pay existing SS recipients. Every dollar you MAY get in the future will come from future workers, not from your own pocket.
It's a Ponzi scheme, and the explosion in recipients is what will kill it.