The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) has updated its interactive online Social Security solvency tool, the Social Security Reformer, that lets users build their preferred solvency proposal to rescue the trust funds before they become insolvent.
Click here to check out CRFB’s updated Social Security Reformer, which includes:
- The latest options to raise revenue and slow benefit growth – including novel ideas from our Trust Fund Solutions Initiative.
- New sections with options to improve work incentives, broaden the payroll tax base, and enhance benefits for vulnerable seniors.
- Updated results based on the latest actuarial projections from Social Security.
- Real-time interactive displays of solvency progress.
- It’s like having an actuary on your phone or computer!
The Social Security retirement trust fund is just seven years away from insolvency, at which point all retirees – both current and new – will face an across-the-board 24% benefit cut, the equivalent of an $18,400 loss in benefits for a typical couple entering retirement.
Even in combination with the disability trust fund, Social Security is just nine years from insolvency and faces a shortfall of 4% of taxable payroll – the equivalent of 23% of benefits or 30% of revenue.
The Social Security Reformer gives you the tools to rescue Social Security from insolvency. Your goal is to prevent the trust fund from running out of money, close the program’s 75-year shortfall, and keep the program in balance through the 75th year. The Reformer tracks your progress in achieving those goals with interactive, real-time displays of how your evolving policy proposal improves overall solvency and displays the year-by-year trust fund ratios and spending and revenue.
Click here to check out CRFB’s updated Social Security Reformer.
With CRFB’s Social Security Reformer, you can select from a range of updated reforms to Social Security’s benefits and taxes, including changes to initial benefits, the retirement age, cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs), the payroll tax rate, the tax base, the taxable maximum, and income taxation of Social Security benefits. You can also select options to improve work incentives, enact targeted benefit reductions, and enhance benefits for vulnerable seniors like low earners and widows.
The updated Reformer now includes new reform options, including ideas from our recently-launched Trust Fund Solutions Initiative. Among the new options includes transitioning to a flat benefit, capping COLAs, broadening the payroll tax base to cover employer- and employee-health insurance contributions, repealing the retirement earnings test, and reforming taxation of benefits.
Policymakers will need to enact a combination of these policies, and soon, to avert trust fund insolvency.
Click here to design your own solution to save Social Security.