The primary issue is Social Security. It’s the biggest driver of spending, and nobody wants to do anything to cap its costs such as means testing or straight up lowering the amount it can pay out.
As for the people that will inevitably bleat about how this is just horrible and we need to lift the cap on taxable SS income, that wouldn’t solve the core problem either unless you pair it with spending caps or cuts.
This would add some more years of runway but does not solve the problem. Eventually, the fund would reach insolvency again. The SSA actuaries estimate that removing the cap would add 21 years before insolvency. 21 years may sound like a lot compared to the handful remaining now, but is well before the retirement age of the average person reading this comment.
Also an underdiscussed issue with such a policy is that while it increases social security fund revenue, it decreases the amount of federal revenue collected. The CBO estimates that about 15% of revenues gained by an uncapped SSA tax are offset (lost) by a reduction in federal revenues. Worsening the deficit problem.
It’s actually pretty easy- pick three or four options that have the very wealthy kick back into society what they have been syphoning out and it balances.
Uncapping income it is applied to and throwing in capital gains would totally solve the problem if you sever the link between contributions and payout (which is a form of means testing).
Right now a ton of wages from top earners are not being taken out for social security because the cap is around 176k (for the current year); I'm assuming it would simply extend the timeline for it hitting its deficit.
"Means testing" is the bad Social Security idea of the year. SS isn't a welfare program. Trimming benefits, changing retirement date (for all) and uncapping contributions are much more palatable to voters.
You aren’t promised your money back with interest; that’s what an IRA is. Social Security is a different system which works by different principles. In Social Security, the money you pay goes to the people who are retired, and your retirement is funded by people who work in the future.
Your money --> older generation
Younger generation ---> you
The main thing that makes my description incorrect / incomplete is that baby boomers, such a large cohort, broke the system. This was predicted and so the baby boomers actually did get their money back: they were taxed to fund OASI, which then goes back to fund baby boomers’ retirements, until it runs out.
Baby boomers (only, sort of) <---> massive cushion in the OASI fund
SS (and the equivalent in other countries) was, in hindsight, an incredibly stupid system to set up that way - people should be exclusively contributing to cover _themselves_ so that it's a saving/investment scheme rather than a pyramid scheme. If you're in poverty in retirement that shouldn't be because the current generation of workers is shrinking. It should be because you failed (or were unable - doesn't matter which) to carry forward enough from your own career.
Social Security is funded by the people paying in, plus the money in funds like OASI. Yes, OASI is treasuries, so it’s connected, but the reason OASI exists is to cover the changing demographics as baby boomers retire. It’s not designed to be, long-term, the way the Social Security system works. The idea is that you collect income on the boomers greater than payouts while their cohort is in the workforce, and the pay that money back out when they retire.
Yes, there are reasons why this isn’t working out as planned. But the idea that “Social Security is the biggest driver of spending” is not a cogent argument.
The OASI fund was at ~$ 2.4 trillion in around 2025. That's only about 1.5 years of payments given no contributions. The net interest from the fund is only around $ 60 billion. If you add in the DI fund, it only changes by about 10%. The $ 1.7 T cost of Social Security in 2026 will not be meaningfully affected by these funds. Mandatory spending payouts will thus have to come from contributions (which are fundamentally just another tax that could be redirected to other priorities) and from the general fund. The contributions brought in around $ 1.3 T in 2026, leaving somewhere around $300 B to be paid out of the funds.
Thus, I think "Social Security is the biggest driver of spending" is a perfectly cogent argument. The mandatory social security contribution is just another kind of income tax.
Obviously we can't just turn off Social Security, for many political, moral, and practical reasons, but any solution to the deficit or debt that ignores social security will be fighting with one hand tied behind its back.
It’s not Social Security, it’s Health and Human Services. It’s been the top line item in the federal budget for several years, and it’s growing at the fastest rate and has the largest unfunded liabilities.
Social security is easy to fix. Just raise the retirement age. Or do nothing and benefits drop by 25% or whatever it takes to become balanced based on current tax revenue.
Good luck rationing hip replacements and breast cancer treatments whose provision is statutorily required by law and whose cost will continue to rise with inflation.
None of this even begins to consider interest on the debt. As interest rates continue to rise and the debt continues to grow this line item will eventually dwarf everything.
Social Security is chump change compared to these two. But at least it’s nominally fixable by faking the CPI numbers used to set the cost of living increases. You can’t charge less for hip replacements or cancer treatments, they cost what they cost.
There are more 401k millionaires now than ever before. I wonder if in 20-25 years decrease in SS payout will be more palatable as people rely on other, far more valuable, retirement accounts.
On the other hand, I’ve been paying into ss for like 3 decades easy. Bitch better have my money!
Social Security is not the issue no wealth tax, capital gains tax being less than income tax are the problem. Social security and government expenses going up are the symptom of the same problem ie not taxing capital gain which has resulting in prices for everything to keep shooting higher than incomes.
I'm not sure I understand why they would route it to other models. It can't be that they don't have enough compute. Maybe worried that the answer from their own models would be bad? Doesn't really make sense, but I could be missing something.
i agree, and it's what made me spend time exploring today.
fair q. call_ ids and gAAAAA blobs arent damning but the rs_ reasoning ids embed a unix timestamp that matches the session to the second, then OpenAI's 819x marker. plus the summary is in OpenAI's summarizer voice.
I'd love to see the drinking stats for male millennials over the past 15 to 20 years. I bet there's a big drop as they age out of prime beer drinking age and start moving into middle age. I say this as I'm part of that demographic, and I hardly drink anymore after having one or 2 craft beers a night in my 20s.
Edit: The downturn in drinking has huge ramifications for restaurants as they make a lot of profit on alcohol.
The real question is why the younger generations aren't adopting the same behaviors. Is there something special about millennials that they drank more or something special about Gen Z that they drink less?
I wasn't talking about that but yeah, both microblogging platforms, short form content and alcohol make a sponge out of your brain. Alcohol does it physically tho.
A gun range being run out of a storage unit? I realize that Florida has gun laws that people would consider nuts (you can have a gun range in your backyard and nobody can really stop you), but I'd think that the contract of the storage unit would absolutely say no gun ranges.
Without splitting hairs, essentially they are self-storage units that are zoned for multi-purpose use. I don't know the right nomenclature to describe them. Heck, I saw a Jamaican barbecue outfit there. I am sure there is some "farming" going on in more than a few of these. Some photos (these are hosted on my own domain, I can't stand Imgur):
I may have expanded the definition of self-storage, apologies, but here's the place I was talking about. There is definitely storage and there are definitely guns and gunsmith shops. Crazy, hey? There are people living out of these, this part of Florida is bananas.
Ah ok, this makes a lot more sense. We have places that look exactly like this near my area of Florida as well, and it's 100% in the "industrial" zoned area. No homes, only commercial businesses and small industrial setups.
Really I don’t mind, I wish there were more archery ranges but I can deal. People all around are nice, all walks of life. But if someone from another continent were to drop in, their eyebrows would have a heart attack.
The reforms that were passed a few years ago are actually working somewhat OK. I'm 3 miles from the beach on the coast and pay under $2k for private home owners insurance.
I'm not. The same people who seemingly magically cared about Flock overnight will move onto something else within the year. There's always something new to be outraged over, Flock is just the flavor of the week.
I think this taps in to why big tech companies are unconcerned as well. How many of these people who oppose data centers have stopped utilizing their outputs? How many of these anti AI folks are using AI either at work or in their personal lives? It's just hot to hate AI right now.
I asked it to create a design system in Paper, and it actually did a fairly decent job when it wasn't getting network errors. I'd say it's much, much closer to good than bad.
Read "Building a new space coast" and I immediately wondered what our elected officials here in Florida must have felt when they saw that line. I'd love for SpaceX to greatly expand their presence here in Florida, but at the same time the coast is probably too built up here for SpaceX to have a facility like that unless they go into the panhandle.
[0] https://www.thesr71blackbird.com/Aircraft/Engines/starting-t...
reply