Despite the jeers Biden got from Republicans for saying what they've got planned out loud, several of them have been angling for months to use the debit limit increase vote as a means to gain leverage to cut social security.
https://prospect.org/economy/republicans-coming-for-your-social-security-medicare/
The thing is, if Republicans really did want Social Security to end, or whatever the actual claim is, they wouldn't have to do anything.
The program is mathematically unsustainable as the administrators of the program have been warning for years. If Republicans wanted to cut Social Security they wouldn't have to face the public blowback of acting against it. They could just sit back and let it cut itself.
The whole story about Republicans wanting to cut Social Security is just really out there fear-mongering. It doesn't match the reality of how federal finances are working out.
And we really need to call out the politicians trying to sell that, well, conspiracy theory.
@dsacer keep in mind that raising the cap on income covered by the SS tax also raises benefit payouts. That's why the cap is there in the first place, to avoid paying more benefits to people who don't need it.
Anyway, I'd say either path, automatic benefit cuts or revamp to make the program sustainable, would effectively be killing the program, either as people understand it or as it is implemented.
The end result is the same: if nothing is done, the program ends, technically or perceptively.
We're already working with a sunsetting program, and the question is whether to do something about that.
@volkris Raising taxes or changing the population structure via immigration is most definitely not killing the program. We've done both before.
Part of the complication is that we've had generation after generation of politician outright misleading, or I would say lying, to the public about what the program is and how it works. So we have this really big perception problem to deal with now.
For example, one of the really big lies is that people pay into the program to fund their own retirements. That's not how Social Security works by law. The money people put in is required by law to be spent just like any other tax revenue, so that money is already gone, even though politicians have flat out told people otherwise their whole working lives.
That makes it tricky to do something like raise the payroll taxes since a lot of people will consider that a breaking of the agreement they thought they had. They thought they had already paid to fund the program, so the increase in taxation sounds unjustified and unfair.
Anyway, it's all a huge mess now, and everyday all of the problems are being kicked farther down the road as politicians continue to be dishonest about the history and current status of the program.
@volkris That doesn't actually end it though; it creates a situation where benefits are cut to match incoming taxes. Totally killing the program requires action by Congress.
Preserving benefits would mean some mix of:
* Eliminate the cap on income covered by the social security tax
* Raise the tax rate for social security
* Tax non-wage income for it
* Use general revenue to support the payments
* Allow increased immigration