Raise Taxes If It Saves Social Security, Americans Say

I would also support means testing for SS Benefits, and also Medicare which the premiums already have means testing but should be even higher, i.e. higher monthly payments.

One thing to keep in mind is that means testing is not so straight forward, income is variable and can be "adjusted" to whatever is "tax efficient".

Exactly... I don't disagree with any of that.

I do know that if you've recently retired, and your income drops to whatever your SS-benefits are, (which can be a great deal less than what you were making in your job), they go back on you for two year's worth of tax-returns, and depending on what your AGI was for those two years, it can increase your share of Medicare/Part-B from about $98/month to $198/month, or even $298/month for the next two years, until your AGI is based solely on your SS-benefits (plus any outside income that you report.) So, Medicare/Part-B is ALREADY "means tested".

As is Social Security to some extent. My pa retired at 62 with a pension from a public utility. When he passed at age 65, that pension benefit was cut in half and mom started receiving survivors benefits from Social Security. My mom retired 9 years later at age 65 with a pension from PERA. When my mother started receiving her pension, the amount that she received from Social Security was reduced. If that isn't a demonstration that Social Security is means tested already, I don't know what else you could possibly call it.

Up until the 1980's, the quintessential middle class family had an opportunity to earn enough that their annual obligation to Social Security was met. Once they reached that milestone, they essentially got a pay raise for the rest of the year. The expansion of Social Security well beyond anything that it was ever set up to do by the federal government has not only taken that away from the middle class families, it has resulted in their being taxed at more than double the rate on more than double the income. Every single dollar of that money is depriving them of another dollar that could be used to put a roof over their family's head, food in the belly of their children and clothes on their backs.

If you are going to take from the current workers to provide a benefit, that benefit should be given to them, not those that are currently retired. The Social Security program needs to end as we know it in favor of fundamentally transforming it into a system whereby the majority of the money that is taken away from people as they work in the form of a tax is placed into an account where they have a private property right of ownership over it. If we want to socialize the system and give everyone who is paying into Social Security the same amount in their private account, I'm willing to have that discussion and that debate. I, personally, would prefer a system that mirrored the PERA for government workers that applied to the private sector. If that system is good enough for our public workforce, it is good enough for the rest of us as well. If Social Security can do without contributions from State workers, we can build a system whereby all workers are giving up a portion of their own wages to provide for their own benefit when they retire just like the program for State workers does. It can be the same kind of formula, your pension is going to be a percentage of what your final years wages was, with a COLA. The money that you contribute would be invested instead of borrowed and spent. Your benefits would no longer be a burden that your children and grandchildren have to bear as it is now.

The Social Security and Medicare programs are both broken. The foundation that they are built on is what is failing them. If we desire to prevent them from total collapse, it is the foundation that the programs are built on that must be fixed. Yes, it will be more painful for some than it is for others, but the ones who will experience the most pain are the ones who stood by and did nothing when they had an opportunity to do so. The posterity shouldn't bear the pain for the mistake of earlier generations, those generations who did nothing to fix the problems are the ones who should live with the pain their inattentiveness has resulted in. If it means I never get to retire so that the posterity's burden is lessened, then so be it.

We've increased the tax burden by over 500% in my lifetime and the programs are still in trouble. Money alone isn't going to fix the problem, it never does; the only permanent fix is a foundational restructuring of the programs themselves. If money were going to fix the problem, increasing the tax burden 500% would have taken care of the problem. Since it didn't, we know that more money still won't fix it either. At some point in time we have to try a different solution instead of continuing to try the same solution that hasn't worked yet over and over and over while telling ourselves that the reason it hasn't worked is that taxes weren't raised high enough.