The kitty is wrong. Dead wrong. My wife does not like dead wrong kitties. Kitty wants to ignore inflation and focus on nominal dollars. Kitty also ignores the disability issue. Bad Kitty. .

First, the solution is simple. Temporarily Eliminate the cap on the withholding tax.

Second. Divorce Disability from SS. Force those who want disability coverage going forward to pay for it.

Third, reform the current disability scam (before you start taking away peoples SS money)

Once these things are done then a permanent solution can be worked on and worked out.

My wife and I are both 68. We both began working at age 12. You could do that back in the 60s. We both paid in to SS for 53 years. Took SS at 62 while still working part time as we have zero trust in the govt.

I look at it like my gun. You can pry it out of my cold dead hands. It needs to be fixed. But not on the backs of people who paid in for 5-6 decades and may have arranged their affairs accordingly.

The kitties calculations are also quite suspect and rely on far too many assumptions and ignore inflation. I was taxed the max every year from 1981-2010, 29 years. I know how much I paid in. I took it early. My break even, in nominal terms, is 17 years 7 months. Call it 18. If I’m alive I’ll be 85, 2 years past my life expectancy. In real terms, adjusted for inflation, I’d need to live to about 150 to get my money back.

Here is the reality. SS recipients have been badly screwed since 1987 when Greenspan conspired with Reagan to change how inflation was measured by BLS…with the goal of reducing future COLA payments. Greenspan projected a savings of 150 billion over 10 years and multiples of that going forward. So the most financially vulnerable segment of our society has purposefully been screwed out of billions of dollars of income over the last 45 years by the govt. No surprise.

I still have the original copy of the pamphlet my grandfather got at work in November 1936, prior to the tax going into effect in 1937. The original tax amount was 1%.

SS tax and funding was never intended to fund a disability program. Most of that program is a scam, that statement is based on firsthand personal knowledge from being directly involved. But when Disability became a part of SS in 1956-60 the funding scheme didn’t change. In 1960, when Disability (for all ages) was added, within one year more than half a million people were on Disability.

Want to fix SS? Start with the disability scam. And leave my SS alone.