The problem is you can’t get all the states to decide how to solve the issue of keeping the social security program solvent. States are often politically at odds with each other, and squabble. So, politicians ignore the problem and nothing gets fixed, and every couple generations restoring solvency becomes a big deal.
A solution:
a) Instead of keeping social security a federal program, allow states to make social security associations. Example: Washington, California, Oregon, New York, New Jersey, and a few other states form their own ‘social security association’. Everything the federal government presently does re: social security administration would be run by the states-association.
b) The SS monies presently held for each state’s populations by the federal government would be transferred to the states-associations. Federal government would get out of SSA completely.
c) The states-associations would naturally form along political lines, making it much easier for political consensus re: taxation to fund social security benefits. Decisions wouldn’t be kicked down the road as much.
d) Each citizen’s SS account would be locked to the SS-association where the SS tax was accrued in. That way you won’t have citizens in a state which is poorly funded re: SSA move to another state just because it as a richly-funded SSA. Citizens can move wherever they want, but their SS benefits would come from the states-association where the SS taxes were accrued. If you live and worked in State-A for 67 years and retired to State-B, your SS benefits would come from states-association-A, not state-association B.
e) If you lived and worked in eight different states over a lifetime you might get your benefits from more than one states-association, apportioned by how much you made in each state.
e) The results: each state would have more control over the taxation for SS benefits. Each would decide who gets the benefits. Decision making re: the administration of the SSA would be more nimble because the states in each administration would be more politically aligned with each other.
Instead of one entity stealing the cash we would have 8 or 10 or more RICO groups lining their pockets. All you have to do is look at how Florida manages health care and insurance. Or look at how pathetic unemployment insurance is in the lowest 5 states compared to Washington State and get a glimpse of what will really happen.
The law that creates those SS-Associations might well be called Oligarchs United.
But how would that be different than the present federal system?
How is that Washington-state’s problem? Why should I have to worry about it? I would rather have the risk carried between Washington, California, New York, and New Jersey than some other states I could name. If they had to look after their own SS benefits maybe they would run their own state’s finances better.
“They” are the politicians who will drain every dime into their own pockets or those of their campaign contributors. Has any politician ever had to rely on SS benefits to pay the rent or put food on the table after leaving the familia?
Putting my SSA in the hands of an association of states that put more into the federal tax system than they pull out, and which are alike in political leanings, sounds like a safe bet for me.
As for other states: maybe they could have the option to stay in the federal system, or make their own states-associations: their choice.
At any rate, I would prefer my SSA to not be dragged into insolvency because a bunch of people are spending time talking about Greenland.
The US government can never run out of $ anymore than a scoreboard can run out of numbers. The federal budget is absolutely nothing at all like a household, business or local government budget. The US can meet all its obligations into perpetuity.
There is a real issue to worry about though. It is the relative size of receivers versus workers. Can the workers produce enough real goods and services to meet the demand of the receivers without being inflationary
If you want to make sure that doesn’t happen you should be adding population to the workforce.
Social Security solvency is easily solved. Raise the retirement age.
When SS was first put in place people didn’t live nearly as long. These days people are living longer than ever and SS retirement age needs to be increased appropriately. This would also likely keep some older workers in the workforce longer helping to alleviate the current labor shortage across all industries.
Full retirement age for SS should be 75. Any withdrawals before that should come with significant reductions to the payout.
What it can’t do is make simple decisions. SS becomes a football, very often because poorer states want more pork from richer states and use the threat of insolvency or raising retirement age as leverage.
Richer states can easily fund their own SSA associations eliminating this source of national wrangling, while keeping retirement age the same.
So, what? 75-year old ABs hauling mooring lines? That’s not going to happen where I work.
I watch my workforce very closely. I have to make sure the ratio between young and old is carefully maintained, because we simply can’t keep up production with a preponderance of old bodies.
Right now our crews are going through fire fighting scenarios at the company training facility. The ABs and mates who could hang out in the hot zone 20 minutes at a time 20 years ago, and go back below after a bottle change, now at 45 years of age can barely last 10 minutes in the hot-zone before coming up for a half hour of recuperation.
People live longer today because medical care kicks death down the road. But that doesn’t mean a 75-year old can do the job that a 60-year old can, and a 60-year old can’t do the work a 50-year old can. I see that all the time.
Increase the retirement age and you will increase the number of workplace injuries, meaning you increase the number of people on disability.
it’d be better to have a mandatory deduction as we have now, but the individual (with some guidance) directs it their own way. and no, illegal immigration costs more than any state or country gets out of it. always.
SS contributions from employers and employees are relatively small. It would make sense to increase them a bit.
SS should be like other public employee pension funds, it should be allowed to invest in stocks, bonds, and real estate, and earn much higher average returns. The average return over the last 150 years is about 11%. If SS were allowed to do that, it would become the largest institutional investor.
The SS full retirement age for younger workers should be raised to 70.
We should allow Canadians to register for SS and live and work in the USA. We need the labor. They need the money. The expectation should be that Americans will eventually be allowed to live and work in Canada.
But if that had been the case in 2008 there would not have been enough money to prevent large number of from going into destitution, as stocks cratered. Those persons would have gone on the public dole, defeating the purpose of SS.
Raise the income cap on SS contributions to $500,000 and index it to inflation. Have all forms of income contribute to the SSA instead of just wages. Problem solved. The people that really want to get rid of social security are the employers who have to match the employees’ contributions and the wizards on Wall Street who want to get their hands on that money.
The best system is when the gov doesnt have control over your pension, they just make the law that you must have one so its all private like a bank account
If you live and worked in State-A for 67 years and retired to State-B, your SS benefits would come from states-association-B, not state-association A.
you mean that or “if you live and worked in State-A for 67 years and retired to State-B, your SS benefits would come from states-association-A, not state-association B”?
Wall Street doesn’t give a shit if you end up living in a cardboard box under a bridge as long as the scammers and politicians (yeah I know that is a redundancy) get a taste of the cash.
How do you think Rick Scott became the richest POS in the Senate? His company’s health care facade earned him $327 million. That is aside from the fact that his company was convicted of 14 felonies and fined $1.7 billion. Did he go to jail? No, but it got him a bed in the Florida governor’s mansion, a senator job and finally a place near the front of the line of Trump’s ass kissers.
Just think what people like him will do if they get the keys to the SSA vault.
In our bizarro world of politics and finance, my choice of crooks is the federal government. It is no less corrupt than the hedge fund managers and banks but it its managers are demonstrably incompetent and far less likely to destroy the system.
But remember in my plan it would be an association of states running each SSA, not one state. It would the same dynamic as we have now but instead of 50 states wrangling over SS it might be 10.
Each state would elect or appoint a group of directors who have to agree on any changes to the joint SS administration, and the states’ governors would have to agree to the changes. Checks and balances.
As for the fear of corporate raiding: States already have pension funds for their employees. Some, like CalPERS are enormous. They have the same structural problems as SS but nobody is raiding them. The joint SSA system would be just another pension fund, albeit with a different funding system.
The new system would not be much different than today except the number of states involved in the system would be smaller and more politically aligned, so necessary changes would be more likely to occur.
States like Washington, California, New York, and New Jersey would likely form the core of one association. They are roughly politically aligned. The fact that those states presently contribute more to the federal tax system than they pull out serves as an indication that they could easily fund their own joint SSA, with a very good chance of maintaining the present retirement ages.
There would be several states-associations, and maybe a remnant of the federal system for states that want that.
Social Security has to be federal- because they have monopoly control of the currency and can NEVER be insolvent. There is zero chance the government can ever be out of $. All of the issues on SS are political choices not monetary. They are manufactured crisis- mainly to create fear they can turn into votes.