Disability News

It's Time To Strengthen Social Security For The Future

WASHINGTON - There have been many stories lately in the newspapers and on television about the growing need to fix Social Security for future generations. And like many other highly politicized issues in Washington, scare tactics and misleading information are capturing everyone's attention. Let's set the facts straight.

Social Security has been a great success for millions of seniors. However, the system is threatened by the changing demographics of our society. As such, the program faces a permanent, structural deficit that will not improve unless significant reforms are undertaken.

Where every person receiving Social Security was once supported by the taxes of 42 Americans, today that ratio has been dramatically reduced to only three payers for every one beneficiary. Its “pay-as-you-go” financing structure worked well when the population was young, but is no longer sustainable. Social Security will go into the "red," i.e., will begin paying out more to beneficiaries than it takes in from workers' payroll taxes, just 13 short years from now. By the time today's 30-year-old retires, the program will be bankrupt, having exhausted its fictional reserves. Why fictional? Because while most Americans think their Social Security taxes are put away annually for safekeeping, unfortunately this is not the case. In actuality, the federal government spends every penny of the Social Security Trust Fund on other government programs, "borrowing" from Social Security, and placing government IOUs in the trust fund. These IOUs are not real assets. The federal government must either borrow money or raise taxes to pay back the trust fund.

Saving Social Security for future generations will involve difficult choices. Yes, it would be easier to ignore the problem. But delay just makes the solution more difficult and costly - translating into higher taxes and/or benefit cuts. The latest Social Security trustees' report shows that each year we wait to fix the problem adds roughly $600 billion to the cost of fixing Social Security for good. Read more at: www.gop.gov

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