[dragonwriter]

Lifting the cap, converting the tax from a payroll to a general income (including capital gains) tax (and therefore also including other income in benefit calculations), and adding several additional bend points rather than capping benefits would stabilize the fund forever, while broadening the kind of income generating activities people could rely on while benefiting from the safety net retirement system.

But simply uncapping the tax without other reforms is probably the easiest short-run solution.

[s1artibartfast]

How is that better than just funding it from the general fund as a welfare wealth transfer?

from the political perspective, I suppose there is a pretext/misconception that social security is self funded on an individual basis, when payments are already extremely progressive, with higher earners subsidizing the low.

The high bend point already diminishes additional benefit for additional contribution nearly to zero.

Someone's last 50k of SS taxable income is already returning only 20% of their first 50K of SS taxable income.

More specifically, below the first bend point, recipients get 90% of their average taxed income. After the last bend point, they are getting 15% of their marginal taxed income . 15% doesn't leave much room for additional reduction bend points.

[dragonwriter]

> How is that better than just funding it from the general fund as a welfare wealth transfer?

Its a wealth transfer regardless of how what you name the pockets the funds pass through on the way to effecting it, another rotation of the names is irrelevant to the function of the solution. The issue is where you get the money (through additional revenue, reduced other spending, or additional debt) to pay for the stabilization, and I think additional revenue in roughly this manner is one of the better ways to do this (I'm actually fine with stopping calling it a separate tax and fund, rolling this tax into income tax, and also making the income tax apply to all income, including capital gains, gifts, and inheritances, equally, and also allowing both voluntary recognition of income for tax purposes in advance of earning/realization and allowing certain taxable events -- especially isolated capital gains windfalls and inheritances -- to be recognized for tax purposes over a period of several years after they occur, but that's getting farther and farther off the immediate topic of funding of Social Security, though the whole set of ideas is interconnected though they aren't all strictly dependent on each other.)

[jfengel]

Funding it from the general fund is probably fine. The whole "trust fund" idea was pretty bogus.

The pay-as-you-go idea never anticipated a baby boom and baby bust, but a trust fund wasn't a good solution, either. It just obscured the fact that it was a tax increase on the lower and middle classes.

Water under the bridge, now. The fact is that social security is an entitlement. If the SS budget does not have enough money to pay it, the government is in violation of the law. The money will come from the general fund, and it will be raised by either taxes or borrowing.