Idea could put Social Security in a serious bind
Sean Williams, Motley Fool
Published 7:00 a.m. ET Sept. 6, 2019 | Updated 11:32 a.m. ET Sept. 6, 2019
For better or worse, Social Security is our nation's most prized social program. It's responsible for divvying out benefits to more than 63 million people each month, 70% of whom are retired workers, and it keeps an estimated 22 million beneficiaries out of poverty. Without Social Security, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that the elderly poverty rate would more than quadruple to over 40%!
... Social Security is vital to the financial well-being of our nation's seniors, and doing anything that could adversely impact the program over the long run isn't advised ...
... Social Security is contending with a $13.9 trillion cash shortfall that's only growing by the year. In each of the past two years, the long-term shortfall has risen by $700 billion, demonstrating that the longer lawmakers wait to act, the more painful the fix will be on working Americans. But temporarily crippling Social Security's workhorse revenue producer, the payroll tax, simply to provide a boost to consumer spending would amount to short-term gains in exchange for long-term pain.
My personal suspicion is that if any temporary payroll tax cut were enacted, the gain in GDP would be relatively minimal, while the depletion of Social Security's asset reserves would be expedited. In layman's terms, the aforementioned cut to benefits could happen even sooner than expected if Trump were to enact a temporary payroll tax holiday of some form ...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/09/06/trump-payroll-tax-cut-how-affects-social-security-your-retirement/2224436001/
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