•Press Release
June 18, 2018
For Immediate Release: June 18, 2018
Contact: Karen Conner, 202-293-5380 x117, [email protected]
Washington, D.C. — The Social Security Trustees report recently predicted that Social Security will face a shortfall in 2034, and that payroll taxes will need to be increased by 2.84 percentage points to eliminate the shortfall entirely. At the same time, the trustees also predict that the average wages will increase by 52.3 percent over the next forty years (in real terms). Today’s CEPR Blog, by Kevin Cashman, illustrates why this wage growth is much more important to workers than the tax needed to fund Social Security. Beyond this, he demonstrates that there are many ways to “fix” Social Security without cutting benefits or hurting workers.
The advice to politicians is clear: focusing on growing the wages of workers should be a top priority, as well as expanding — not cutting — Social Security.
###
