this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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Apologies, but your specific example is incorrect. The cap on social security taxes is adjusted every year not by act of congress, but by existing law that indexes the cap to inflation. Therefore, it is already baked into the way it is scored and is not ignored.
You are correct that scoring cannot take into account any actions congress may take.
This time is a little different though than history. From 1984-2020, Social Security took in more in revenue than it paid out on benefits. It is now running at a deficit. Since being formed, it has run at a deficit less than 15 total years, and most of them earlier on. The social security trust fund has never been depleted during that time either. Without any changes to law, it will continue to run at a deficit until the late 2030s when the trust fund would be depleted and taxes alone would cover a projected 80% of benefits.
That 80% is why it's bullshit to your point. There are so many simple, easy ways to solve this and if they do nothing, we could continue to pay out 80% of benefits with no other changes but that'll never happen. It would be political suicide to literally starve our retired population. My favorite way to address it is removing the cap, but there's other small adjustments that make a huge difference. Things like changing the inflation adjustment to a similar but lower index, raising the retirement age, raising the tax by less than a percent, means testing, etc ... and the thing that pisses me off is the sooner we take one of these actions, the more of the trust fund is preserved, and the impact is so much greater. I don't like the other solutions and would strongly prefer raising the cap, but I'd take most of them over inaction, depleting the trust fund, and reducing benefits.
I was trying to keep it short and simple by skipping a step but yes, the SSA follows a formula to raise the cap. But anything the executive does must be authorized by Congress, including the current formula which was set in a reauthorization bill back in the 80s (I think, maybe the 70s, apologies, but I'm not able to look it up right now). So far, every time a budget is passed and every few years when the SSA needs to be reauthorized, they've left them alone. Despite the occasional bill messing with the SSA getting introduced, they never get out of committee.
As far as the CBO goes I don't recall ever reading about cap increases in their report summaries on the trust fund. Although I have read their reports on the effect of various proposed changes to the way the cap is calculated. I'll have to do some more looking when I have the time, but I was definitely under the impression cap increases were in a category the CBO didn't anticipate future changes to when evaluating the health of the trust fund. I thought normally the COLAs would also fall into this category but that is overridden by them being mandatory spending, as opposed to discretionary, so they have to be taken into account. I'm certainly no expert and wouldn't be surprised to find out I missed something.