When Will Social Security Run Out of Money?

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Bill Scher with liberaloasis.com. When will social security run out of money? The answer is never. So you can be quite confident that your social security will be there for you when you reach sixty five. Some people say that is the case because the social security trust fund is scheduled to run out of money in the year twenty forty nine. That does not mean that people will not access social security benefits. The trust fund is established to handle demographic shifts over time. The very worst case scenario, if no changes are made to the social security program, by the year twenty forty nine instead of having a hundred percent scheduled benefits, you would get seventy eight percent. But even that would be a larger amount of benefits then you would get if you access social security today, because those benefits are expected to climb over time. So there is no crisis in social security and to make sure that a hundred percent of benefits are available by the year twenty forty nine, only very minor changes are needed to the program. For example if we raised what's known as the payroll tax cap, right now there's a cap on the level of income that's subject to social security taxes, because it's actually a flat progressive tax that allows higher income Americans to pay a lower percentage of social security taxes. If we rectified that, that in and of itself could solve this very minor problem in social security."