Over at the Dispatch, Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute does the thankless work of dispelling politician-generated myths about Social Security. Some samples:
- “Current law mandates that when the trust fund balance hits zero . . . the system will be legally forbidden from borrowing or receiving any more general revenues. Program spending must then fall to match the system’s revenues, and that will mean an automatic across-the-board 23 percent benefit cut.”
- “In 1999, the Social Security trustees warned that Social Security’s old-age benefits trust fund would reach insolvency in 2036. In 2023, they warned it would be insolvent by 2033. In other words, the projected insolvency date has moved forward, not backward.”
- “Seniors have the lowest poverty rate of any age group, and their average household incomes have grown four times as fast as the average worker since 1980.”
- “Because most retirees are wealthier than the taxpayers financing their benefits, Social Security today largely redistributes income upward, not downward.”
- “The idea that Social Security taxes and benefits are immutable and can never be revisited is wildly ahistorical.”
Read the whole thing here. And check out his Capital Matters article on Social Security and Medicare insolvency from last year here.