If you’ve been paying attention to politics for more than two years, you’ve likely lived through at least one death-of-Social-Security scare 💀 But there is no real crisis here, just an opportunity to pull more seniors out of poverty. We break it down in this thread 🧵
Let’s be clear: These Social Security scares are a trickle-down tactic popularized by anti-government think tanks to trigger a “reform” movement that would privatize Social Security, making it much less useful, universal, and efficient.
Trickle-downers scream in the media that a program is teetering on the brink of collapse, and then they push it over the edge. We saw it with welfare reform in the ’90s, and we're seeing it again today.
If Social Security was actually in trouble, Congress could easily solve this problem by raising the Social Security cap.
The dirty secret of the program is that this year, people won’t pay into Social Security for any dollar earned over $142,800, meaning that the richer you are, the less you pay into the system.
If we made it so every American—rich or poor—contributes the same share of their salary into Social Security, estimates say we’d be able to make the system work even better and eliminate poverty in our elderly population for the next 75 years.
That’s not the only solution available to us, either— we could also increase the payroll tax or the capital gains tax to expand Social Security benefits. Whatever solution you favor, the fact is that there’s no Social Security crisis —only an opportunity.

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