Subject: Taxing salary over $72,600 for Social Security
To strengthen Social Security, why not tax salary over $72,600, which is currently not taxed for Social Security? This would substantially strengthen Social Security even with increases in Social Security benefits based on the increased contributions. Social Security's Office of the Actuaries estimated in 1998 that requiring higher salaries to pay Social Security tax would take would take away 69% of the deficit they project.
And the deficit projected by the Social Security trustees has been pessimistic in the extreme. These trustees say they are more confident about their near-term projections than their long-term projections. But even their near-term predictions of our economic growth (real Gross Domestic Product) have been way off. The economic growth predictions they made in 1997 for that same year and for 1998 were off by $260 billion! In 1998 the economy grew 95% more than they had predicted!
Such wobbly predictions should hardly be used to gut Social Security's guarantees and place our senior citizens at the mercy of the stock market. Instead, if there must be action, let it be to have the highest paid 6% of Americans pay Social Security taxes on all their salary, like the great majority of Americans do.
