Social Security Financing

Social Security benefits are paid through a self-financing system. Payroll taxes paid by workers and employers form the bulk of the revenue used to pay benefits to current Social Security recipients. 

In 1984, the Social Security Administration intentionally began collecting more revenue than was needed to pay benefits each year. This was done in anticipation of the future retirement of the baby-boom generation. As required by law, the excess revenue has been invested in special-issue U.S. Treasury bonds rather than in private stocks, bonds, and other publicly traded assets. These Treasury bonds are fully guaranteed by the U.S. government and provide interest income to the Social Security trust funds (Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund and the Disability Insurance Trust Fund). When Social Security revenue is insufficient to pay full benefits, Social Security can redeem trust fund bonds to make up this difference. 

Social Security will require adjustments to ensure that promised benefits continue to be paid in full in the future. Demographic and economic changes have eroded the system’s finances. As a result, Social Security currently pays out more in benefits than it collects in revenue each year. Restoring fiscal balance to Social Security will require an increase in revenue, a reduction in benefits, or some combination of the two. 

There are a variety of proposals to increase revenue for Social Security. They include investing a portion of trust fund revenue in private equities, increasing the amount of earnings subject to the Social Security payroll tax, and taking other steps to improve the progressivity of the financing system. 

Investing a portion of the trust fund revenue in instruments other than U.S. government securities would increase rates of return for the trust funds over the long term. Pooling investments reduces the risk of large fluctuations in returns. It also keeps transaction and reporting costs to a minimum, thus producing higher net returns than similarly invested individual accounts. Some policy experts have expressed concerns that political considerations could drive government investment decisions. They fear the government might interfere in corporate governance or that an influx of so much government money into the stock market might interfere with or skew the market. 

Increasing the earnings taxed to pay for Social Security benefits would improve the system’s finances. Workers and employers each pay 6.2 percent in taxes on wages up to the maximum amount of taxable earnings for Social Security, which is $147,000 in 2022. This maximum taxable wage increases annually based on wage growth, provided a cost-of-living adjustment is made. In 1977, Congress set the maximum taxable wage with the intent of covering about 90 percent of covered earnings. Today, because wage growth has not been evenly distributed, only about 83 percent of covered wages are subject to the payroll tax. This decline has occurred because wages above the maximum taxable wage have increased more rapidly than wages in general. Only workers earning more than that threshold would be affected by increasing the maximum taxable wage to cover a larger portion of wages. If Social Security were taxing 90 percent of American wages as intended, the maximum taxable wage would already have been about $295,000 in 2022, according to Social Security actuaries. 

A shortfall may develop in one of the trust funds from time to time even though total revenue to both trust funds is sufficient to continue paying benefits. Reallocating assets from one trust fund to the other can protect against potential cuts in benefits.