Lawmakers managed to fix Social Security in the 1980s. But those fixes won’t work a second time.
The Social Security program is on track to burn through its savings account by 2035 unless Congress changes the law before then. But lawmakers are loathe to take up the issue, and experts say the longer they wait to come up with a solution, the more painful those solutions will be.
Social Security had a similar funding crisis in the early 1980s, when the program was within months of needing to cut benefits before President Ronald Reagan and Congressional leaders pulled together a bipartisan commission to save the program.
“They really did kind of like run up to the very deadline before Social Security was going to run out of money for benefits, so we cut it close to the wire. Nothing like a deadline to create that sense of crisis,” said Jennifer Erkulwater, a professor of political science at the University of Richmond. But, in the current political environment, “I don’t know that we’re in that same space,” she said.
Some of the changes made back in 1983 to fix the program are some of the same ideas being considered now.
“They did raise taxes, they did lower benefits by raising the retirement age, and they put Social Security on the path of solvency for decades and decades, but it literally was within a few months of running out of revenue,” said R. Douglas Arnold, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and author of the book Fixing Social Security: The Politics of Reform in a Polarized Age.
Arnold said he believes the same thing is likely to happen in 2035, that Congress will wait until the last minute to come up with a solution.
But, pointed out Charles Blahous, a senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center, a think tank that describes itself as focused on market-oriented ideas, some of the fixes used in 1983 were one-time solutions.
“They exposed benefits to income taxation for the first time, they brought in all new federal employees to pay payroll taxes into the system for the first time,” he said. “That’s obviously not something we can do again, because it’s already been done.”
Another difference between then and now is that with baby boomers retiring and birth rates going down, there are fewer workers paying into the system than in the past. So the gap between the payroll taxes coming in and the social security benefits going out has been widening for years.
“The ratio of working age people to support each retiree is shrinking and shrinking fast, and so it places a heavier and heavier burden on each individual working-aged person,” said Jennifer Erkulwater at the University of Richmond. “People are living so much longer past retirement than they used to. So that, you know, workers who are out there paying payroll taxes are having to pay that for a lot longer, for a lot more people than prior generations.”
Blahous at the Mercatus Center said all these considerations means that, unlike in the 1908s, waiting to act until the reserves in the Social Security Trust Fund are almost spent just isn’t an option.
“If you wait till the 2030s and say, ‘OK, let’s try to fix the trust fund at the last minute,’ well, you can’t do that anymore, because by then the annual shortfall is so large that there’s no realistic way you could close it,” he said.
And the longer Congress waits to find a solution to that problem of the future, the closer it gets to repeating a crisis of the past.