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Man, wish we could have put that money in some sort of locked box...

Social Security should be reformed. The surplus should be given back and laws passed that forbid touching it. Further:

• The amount paid out should be significantly increased (after decades of working I would make less than $3,000/mo on SSDI, for example, which isn’t enough for me to live on my own even)
• There should be no income cap for taxation purposes
• The retirement age should be lowered to 60 and taxes/formulas modified accordingly.
• It should not take years for anyone to make it through applying for disability.

Honestly, Social Security should also be responsible for paid sick/family leave, short term and long term temp/perm disability, unemployment, etc. We in the US could have it so much better…

Your forgetting Ronald Reagan was the one who started borrowing from it and saying here is an IOU

There has never been a separate fund. The "money" is still there, its in IOU's.

Yeah it’s not enough to live on. I want to be able to survive on social security when I’m old, so I’ll fight for old people to be able to survive on it now. And a little something for a surplus.

Taxes aren’t why you’re poor, shit pay is

Also social security for all is UBI, we can demand that

George W Bush drained the fund to pay for the Iraq war

Not really. Bush ended Clinton's budget surplus and replaced it with a budget deficit, and I won't argue if you hold the wars responsible.

But SS is not part of the normal budget. It was running a surplus in the Bush years. There was a debate over what to do with the surplus.

Keeping it "stuffed in a mattress" would be irresponsible for the same reason most of us don't keep our life savings in a checking account. Bush wanted to invest it in the stock market, but the public rightly thought that was too risky. So it was invested in the most risk-free asset: Treasury bonds.

That means that the government could spend the surplus, but they are required to pay it back with interest. Failing to pay back SS would trigger a default, no different than crashing through the debt ceiling.

The Social Security Trust Fund is nearly $3T

This current crisis is brought to you by the Republicans.

It's probably important to consider that the Iraq war was enthusiastically bipartisan with one glaring exception: Bernie Sanders. Therefore, it's not entirely honest to (rightly) fault the Iraq War as a starting point for the problems with SS and not also fault Democrats for their role in making those decisions.

Make the rich pay!

This is the only way to fix the problem, but it's never going to happen. Every two years we vote for legislators who are fabulously wealthy and have made all manner of corruption legal for federal legislators. (ie, loaning your campaign money at interest, insider trading, using classified briefings for stock moves, etc.)

Now's a good time to repeat what I do every campaign season: Don't give candidates your money. Put it in your investments, and then no matter who is elected, you will have some representation as both parties care more about the stock market than they do about you.

I wonder who benefits from this bs. What's even the goal?

If you're under 50 and expecting to retire someday, I've got some bad news about the climate.

Just for those unaware - the social security pay-in is a percentage of your income, but the maximum amount of your income subject to social security withholding is capped at a fixed level that increases annually. The last time I looked, the cutoff was somewhere around $138k. So if your cumulative income for the year hits $138k in, say, June, you are no longer subject to SS withholding and your weekly paycheck goes up by a couple of hundred dollars or so as a result. Most people don’t hit this amount, but enough do that were the cap eliminated, it would increase solvency and possibly allow for an increase in payouts.

On the flip side, your payout from social security is proportional to what your pay in was. It’s still capped, and it’s not really enough to live on. Those who hit the cap typically have multiple other sources of savings for retirement and could easily contribute more to the national program.

As one of those high earners, yes. Absolutely. I’d even say do it like Medicare and above a certain income you pay a slightly higher rate that normal too.

The media doesn't care about right and wrong anymore. Right and wrong doesn't sell soap as well as giving you something you can agree with or disagree with to fit a certain ideology to keep your eyes glued to their channel or website.

If you change nothing else you will still run out of money in the fund if the population ever starts to stagmate or decline again. It is basically a pyramid scheme. Importing more people is only a short term fix.

Came here to post this. Citations Needed completely changed how I view issues like this.

reframe[s] the conflict between rich and poor as one between young and old

TL;DR

Our generation is going to have less children, so who’s going to pay into it when you’re too old to work?