Are America’s Social Security benefits too generous? Some fiscal hawks and classic conservatives say the answer is ‘yes,’ and see the upcoming depletion of the trust fund as an opportunity to rein them in.
Social Security [or the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance programme, as it is officially known] was meant to be insurance against poverty, they say, not the sole source of income for middle-class retirement. The programme needs to institute benefit caps, means testing, or even a flat benefit structure to remain viable.
It is an interesting line of reasoning, to say the least. The current benefit formula was adopted in 1977 and was designed to keep the replacement rate of benefits—that is, the benefit in retirement as a share of average earnings while working—stable. It mostly worked out that way, except that an increase in the US retirement age in 1983 effectively cut benefits, so upcoming retirees get relatively less.
That’s not to say that it is obvious how generous Social Security benefits should be. In fact, it is a question that the scheme has faced since its creation in 1935. But it would be a mistake to limit the upcoming reform to an accounting exercise, because it is an opportunity to ask if and how Social Security can help Americans manage the risks of a modern economy.
Certainly, at the beginning, elderly Americans needed a life raft. They were mostly poor. Very few of them had any kind of pension.
One argument for a retirement scheme was that it would relieve the labour market of the presence of older, more desperate workers. The most popular proposal at the time, the Townsend Plan, advocated a universal (and generous) basic income for the elderly, paid for with a national sales tax.
Social Security was the compromise. Benefits would be directed to workers based on what they earned. The use of a payroll tax gave workers a stake in the programme while limiting unfunded expansions—something that (as we all know today) is easy to do with general funds.
In the first 45 years of its life, Social Security expanded—with coverage extended to families, death, disability and nearly all industries—while benefits were tinkered with again and again.
The basic structure was there: benefits were progressive and based on past earnings. There was no increase to nominal benefits from 1940 to 1950, then 10 cost-of-living adjustments by 1974, followed by annual automatic increases. The original benefit formula saw two major revisions and another half dozen adjustments.
By the 1970s, Congress had zeroed in on a formula—but it double counted inflation, which led to truly runaway benefits. That mistake was addressed in 1977.
In 1983, a reform of the scheme cut benefits via an increase in the retirement age and a tax on high-income beneficiaries, but did not alter the formula itself. For the next 43 years, to the present day, Social Security has been on autopilot.
So, it has been a long while since there have been any experiments with Social Security, but the programme is not meant to be kept in a glass case. Benefits, formulas, coverage—they can all be changed.
In that sense, it is not all that surprising to hear noise about the scheme’s benefits being too high. Detractors of Social Security point out that it is not 1935 anymore. The US does not have the same problem of elderly poverty and there are many more ways to save for retirement. Lower the benefits, they argue, lower the taxes, and increase opportunities for private savings and investment.
The problem with this reasoning is twofold. One, Americans like Social Security as it is, and if anything support expanding it. Two, Americans are already anxious about their economic security.
You can pull out whatever statistic you prefer: the 37% of Americans who say they could not meet a $400 expense; the 54% who say their financial situation is poor or fair, or the 55% who say it is getting worse. You could cite the half of Americans who cannot afford health care, the rise in delinquent loans, the cratering of consumer sentiment or a median household income that has not risen much in five years.
In this context, it is hard to sell the idea that what the American economy needs is less Social Security protection for people. The risks facing Americans have changed over the last 91 years.
Rather than seeing Social Security as a reflection of 1935’s problems, as faced by Americans of the time, the objective should be to see the programme as an answer to 2026’s problems. As even the programme’s critics pointing to its high benefits admit, Social Security has been effective at the job it was designed to do. So let’s put it to work, and do more. ©Bloomberg
The author is a labour economist and independent policy consultant.