The current system is mathematically unsustainable as a result of politics.

If you're going to untie benefits from payments then the first sensible thing to do is to make the same payments to everyone instead of giving more to people who made more money, but this would result in large numbers of affluent retirees voting against you.

If you're going to untie benefits from payments then the second sensible thing to do is to eliminate social security tax whatsoever and fund the program from general revenues, which would remove the need for the farce of a "social security trust fund" (the government owes itself money: it's a debit and a credit in equal amounts and nets to zero). But then people would condemn you for "bankrupting social security" or "stealing the trust fund" or similar nonsense, funded by the people the tax burden would be shifted onto.

Removing the cap while leaving the program as it is not only is worse than either of these things, it doesn't even solve the problem, because the program as-designed would then be making higher payments to all of those people when they retire which would consume more than all of the money they paid in because people who made more money tend to live longer.

Can you elaborate? It seems like the govt has a liability and the pensioners have an asset.

That fund is an asset full of assets. Those assets are government debt. Owning your debt basically nets to 0.

The point is that the "trust fund" is a NOP. It's like writing a check to yourself. When you go to deposit it into your account, your account balance doesn't change.

Every penny the Social Security Administration withdraws from the "trust fund" is either coming out of that year's general revenues or is causing the US government to sell more treasuries into the bond market. It's the same thing that would happen if the "trust fund" was empty and the money the Social Security Administration pays out in excess of what it collected that year came out of general revenues or deficit spending.

Worrying about what happens if it "runs out" is ridiculous. It's like worrying about what happens if you run out of checks you wrote to yourself. What you need to worry about is where you're actually going to get the money.

Which you can go ahead and do already because both "social security tax" and "deficit spending" aren't particularly ideal, but that's what's happening today. Social Security tax is one of the most regressive taxes we have.

This is the kind of economic theory that loses people. It’s like what economists say deficit spending doesn’t matter because a govt isn’t like a person. It certainly matters if confidence in the system matters.

The fact that you acknowledge the money comes from side other source implies there’s a tradeoff. There’s no free lunch here, regardless how creative the accounting gets.

The Social Security Administration charges tax to Bob and then uses the money to make payments to Alice. For some years it was taking in more than it was paying out, so it used the rest to buy US government bonds, which is really just giving the money to Congress to spend on something else. Then Congress spent it on something else. It's all gone. All you're left with is a piece of paper that says the government owes itself money -- and not even as much of it as Bob was promised.

Now Bob is retired and expects his money back. But most of the money went to Alice and the rest went to Congress in 1994. There's no money. If you want money to pay Bob then you need to collect more taxes or sell more government bonds into the market.

So which of those things do you want to do? And if you want to use tax revenue, do you want it to be the regressive inefficiently duplicative social security tax or general taxes that don't charge higher effective tax rates to people who make less money?

Now I will agree that this is a contrived problem because SSI is a contrived system. We could just change the rules and make it continue to work, but that will come with tradeoffs.

You might not think that's fair. I do. Even under this hypothetical regime, I know who I'd choose to be: rich and paying a ton in taxes, in a heartbeat.

I think my larger point is we have to zoom out for a systems level analysis. We shouldn't assume that the production is de-coupled from the consumption, and production can come with a host of negative externalities. I'm not convinced that wonton consumption (especially for the sake of itself) is a net positive, given human nature's tendency to be insatiable with regard to consumption.

I would include the debasement of one's moral soul for social-climbing purposes in the set of aforementioned sacrifices. :)

In any case, I did mention the dangers of overconsumption. There is something in between that and subsistence that is a net-positive for society (in this epoch, at least).

I'm relatively lucky in that I do hit the SS income cap every year. And I think it's extremely stupid that my paycheck suddenly grows 6.2% well before the end of the year every year. I can absolutely afford to continue paying my 6.2% tax, just like everyone else, and not need special treatment when withdrawal time comes in retirement.

But it's "the third rail" because there is so much money on the table. It's a program that makes transfer payments, which is zero sum, so any change will be fought hard by whoever ends up worse off than they are under the status quo.

Social Security is compulsory savings, and you get out pretty much what you put in.

(Maybe I'm focusing too much on one word.)

> it's "the third rail" because there is so much money on the table.

Also, I think because people feel an existential threat - some people rely on that money to survive.

And because, after seeing that deduction every two weeks for their entire lives, they want their payout.

But it is like insurance in that the program is named Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Program.

It's also like insurance in that the payout is related to the premium / taxes. If you pay your premiums and experience the covered risks, you (or your survivors) get paid.

It's not like savings, because if you don't experience disability, or old age, you don't get paid. Your survivors might still get something though, I don't know much about survivor benefits.

Disability insurance is available from private insurers, but with different terms. Old-age insurance is more or less an anuity, again available from private insurers, with different terms.

The biggest difference with social security is that smaller incomes (and thus, smaller payments into oasdi) get a larger payment per dollar income if they experience a covered event. Another major difference is that if one has multiple former spouses of marriages that lasted at least 10-years, they're all potentially eligible for spousal benefits and they don't have to share it: no private insurer would sign up for that. Also, the actuarial tables are rarely updated and rather out of date at this point.

It pays until you die instead of paying until you run out of savings. The risk it's insuring against is that you live longer than the average person and outlive your savings.

The private insurance companies that offer this type of insurance call it an annuity.

> Also, I think because people feel an existential threat - some people rely on that money to survive.

Nah, the more sensible of the reform proposals are the ones that convert it into a fixed payment for everyone. Those proposals are still every hard to pass because some people would get more than they do now and some would get less, and the people who would get less are the more affluent people with no existential risk, but they would still fight it.

> And because, after seeing that deduction every two weeks for their entire lives, they want their payout.

The program started by making payouts to people who never paid in. Their money is already gone, given to their own parents.