I agree with Romina Boccia’s conclusion at the Daily Signal to the effect that there’s an urgent need to reform Social Security. I think that most of the provisions of the Social Security Reform Act of 2016 which she touts are reasonable enough.
It’s hard for me to get past the point that Social Security’s primary problem is that the wage distribution assumptions under which it operated haven’t panned out. Either a lot more people should be earning between $80,000 and $110,000 than is presently the case or Social Security should be detached from wages entirely. In other words I think the SSRA is looking too much at the number of participants and not hard enough at incomes.
Remember all those neat graphs showing how medium and lower quintile level wages haven’t increased much since 1970, likely because wages for the top quintile have gone up considerably in that period? There’s the confirmation of your argument — a lot more people should be making 80-110 thousand dollars a year.
(More accurately, when people contemplated the future for projecting SS income-outgo figures back in the mid to late 20th Century, it was assumed wages would continue to rise at 1945-1970 rates — and they didn’t.)