Tag: Social security solvency

Abstract As interest in proposals to restore Social Security solvency rises, it’s timely to examine whether current policy analyses provide adequate information on important distributional questions. This project explores measures of changes in Social Security benefits’ adequacy, horizontal equity, and efficiency under different proposals. We apply the measures to simulation output from the Urban Institute’s…

The brief’s key findings are: Low earners receive much more in Social Security benefits than they pay in Social Security taxes, reflecting the program’s progressive design. The interaction between Social Security provisions and income taxes has little net effect on the program’s progressivity: the exemption of employers’ Social Security contributions from workers’ income taxes makes the system…