Maya MacGuineas is the president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
Social Security Among Other Funds, Will be Insolvent
Our government major trust funds are are going to be insolvent, social security in particular. It’s going to be insolvent in six years. This is an unconscionable situation that we found ourselves in, and yet the conversation still continues to be people competing not to do anything to fix the program, with some important exceptions.
AARP Corruption Towards Social Security
I will say that the AARP, that says it focuses on protecting seniors, is one of the organizations that actively opposes any changes to fix it, and it tries to intimidate members whenever they start to talk about those changes. We have got to start talking about how to fix social security. All the warning signs are there, yet we do nothing.
Government Borrowing and Spending Leads to Social Security Going Insolvent
With the exception of the Fiscal Responsibility Act last year, almost everything that we’ve done in the past decade and more has relied on more government borrowing. Unoffset tax cuts, infrastructure bill, PACT, spending on seniors, which made social security insolvent even sooner. There are more and more things that we continue to choose to borrow for. It’s going to cause a generational resentment, and younger people are going to be right to be angry about it.
Government Politics and Policies – The Numbers
Politics don’t help. Both parties spend a lot of time blaming each other. We know that all sorts of government policies have contributed to social security and other funds going insolvent. About 30% of the increase in GDP since we had budget surpluses comes from tax cuts. About 33% comes from government spending increases. About 28% comes from responses to recessions. Really importantly, three quarters of all those policies were bipartisan. Nobody likes to raise taxes. Nobody likes to cut government spending. We need to do both of them. As bad as these numbers are, they could easily be worse.
What we Can Do About Government Spending, Borrowing and Fix Social Security
Just a few examples I think include if we don’t replace the tariff revenue, if we extend the tax cuts and don’t have them expire, as some of them are built into OBA, if we revert and include, if we bring back the ACA subsidies, just those three things alone, another $5 trillion. There’s so many more things that we could look at in emergency supplemental, increases in defense spending, scaling back the Medicaid savings, unforeseen emergencies, higher interest rates, and the list goes on and on of things that the government could continue to borrow more for. So what do we do? Thank you again for holding the hearing.
