March 08, 2011
Many people in policy debates have argued that means testing, or reducing Social Security payments to affluent beneficiaries, can be an effective way to save money for the program and to reduce the federal budget deficit. A new CEPR report examines the feasibility of several different means-testing scenarios and finds the potential savings to be rather limited.
“The majority of Social Security beneficiaries are lower- to middle- income people,” said Dean Baker, an author of the paper and a co-director at CEPR. “The number of beneficiaries who are by most standards considered affluent is too small to raise a significant amount of money via means testing.”
Read the full report here.
