General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Easy cure for the Social Security issue..This is a no brainer. [View all]karynnj
(59,501 posts)In fact, many people are treated as independent contractors, who should be considered employees. They either get a 1099 or no tax documentation at all, but they are required to include any income on their tax returns. (Of course, some of the non documented income never is reported.)
Then, if no social security was paid, you pay both the employer halves and the employee halves. (My husband and I have helped out 20/30 something year old daughters do their taxes.)
Otherwise, this is a wonderful statement on social security. Like you, I remember the increase in rate and cap of the 1980s. I also was very angry when some Republicans in the mid 2000s said that the money borrowed by the country from the reserves social security invested in treasury bills - the only option to store the money in the legislation - should be considered not there because it would harm the economy for the budget to have to repay this as needed!
What that meant was that in the 1980s under the guise of creating a large surplus to prepare SS for the coming retirement of the baby boomers was raided to pay for the Reagan tax cuts - mostly for the wealthy. Here is an article that is very out of date but it has a very clear explanation of the social security reserve fund. Any current complaint that the government can't let social security liquidate its bonds to pay benefits needs to be responded to by pointing out that the same people likely to complain are the ones who voted for the huge Trump tax cut, that gave most of the cuts to the super wealthy -- without doing much to help the economy.
Raising the cap is the easiest solution - even though Greenspan instead (at the end of the article) spoke of cutting benefits. I remember my favorite Senator (Kerry) quoting someone that retirement was at one time designed to depend on a three legged stool - social security, pensions, and retirement savings. More than a decade ago, he noted that for most people, there was only one leg left - social security. Recently, there were news articles on the percent of people nearing retirement without either a defined benefit pension (once common) or significant savings. This makes social security as important as it was when it was created!