Expanding benefits: how do we pay for it?

“Expand Social Security? We don’t even have the income and reserves to pay for it NOW–if we expand it, where’s the money going to come from?”

We’ve read this question a million times, but given the immediate financial problems facing Social Security, we won’t say it isn’t a fair question to ask.

If you want to buy something, you’ve got to have the money to buy it. And if our entire dilemma is we can only afford to pay current scheduled benefits for a very limited time under the current system, how is it true we can possibly afford to EXPAND those benefits?

Well, we can–with a few commonsense changes to our tax code that won’t affect the vast majority of American workers.

The truth is not only can we extend Social Security’s solvency past 2034, keeping all currently scheduled benefits intact, but we can also do the same thing while increasing benefits in the form of a revised, realistic COLA, a larger minimum benefit for low earners, and a larger primary benefit for all beneficiaries (all features of the Social Security Expansion Act).

All we have to do is revise a feature of our payroll tax code that many have called counterintuitive, regressive, and flat-out unfair for years.

Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich on The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow explains.