The answer to funding SS and Medicare should be simple. More immigration

[RB TexLa]

We raise less children then we used to. Who can blame us, they take time and money to raise. We have people willing to come here and happily pay this stuff for us.



US Population Growth Rate

[Warpy]

1. The US population is growing, thanks. What aren't growing are jobs and the wages they pay

Increasing the minimum wage to a living level of $15/hour would solve both any OASDI shortfall while creating demand for goods and services that would pur job growth.

Don't buy the scare tactics that say businesses will shut down because they can't afford to pay fair wages. The truth is that there has never been an outcry to roll back any increase in the minimum wage because business goes up as a result of it across the board.

Giving the American people a raise will do more than shore up Social Security, it will also greatly increase tax revenue at the Federal level.

Depressing wages to end inflation was a rousing failure. All it did was wreck the economy and people's lives along with it.

[pampango]

2. Republicans don't want to fund SS and Medicare and they don't like immigration.

I suppose that should tell us something.

[eridani]

3. No it isn't. The answer is scrapping the cap

Plus, productivity has increased by a factor or four since the end of WW II. If workers got their fair share of that, there wouldn't be any problem funding SocSec, Medicare or anything ele.

[DiverDave]

6. nailed it

eom

[Hoyt]

4. If we had the jobs, that would be part of solution but not total solution.

[customerserviceguy]

5. Another layer

into the pyramid scheme? Yeah, that will buy us another 20-30 years or so.

[eridani]

8. Bullshit

http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/bashing-the-piata/

Critics of Social Security say that the en masse retirement of the baby boom generation will create an overwhelming imbalance in the ratio of workers to beneficiaries, leading to a Ponzi-like collapse of the system. The problem with this argument, according to Dean Baker of the Economic Policy Institute, is that the ratio of dependents (retirees plus children) to workers will actually be significantly lower in 2030, the year Social Security is supposed to melt down, than it was in 1960, before the baby boom entered the work force. In other words, the boomers' much-hyped retirement ought to be no worse for the economy than were their student days.

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/the-hill-has-a-problem-with-theory-and-practice

"The [Social Security] trust fund itself has a theoretical $2.6 trillion surplus, but that money has been spent by the federal government like general revenues."

It is not clear what information the paper thinks is added by the word "theoretical." It is possible to add the word to almost any sentence (e.g. "Washington has a theoretical basketball team&quot . When something actually exists in the world, calling it "theoretical" is presumably intended to impugn it in some way.

Of course the trust fund does exist in the world, it is held in the form of U.S. government bonds. These bonds are referred to as "IOUs" in the Hill piece. It is highly unusual to refer to bonds of private corporations or government bonds as IOUs.

[Yo_Mama]

7. Unfortunately, if wages and jobs aren't there, funding won't be maintained

And that is where we are!

If you import enough immigrants to create a huge low-wage economy, you are going to end up funding them rather than having them fund SS.

Your idea would work if we had a much more vibrant economy. So far, it's a failure. It is probably making the funding gap worse.