Who’s gonna pay for your Social Security?

Very soon, Social Security may not have enough money to make full payments to retirees. Very soon. Like by 2032, just six years from now. So what are we gonna do about it? Today on the show, we look at some of the most talked about possible solutions; and exactly whose wallets we’ll have to rifle through to find the money to pay for each. Then we’ll run the options by the Social Security Administration's former Chief Actuary. The guy Congress used to call to crunch numbers and give them the bottom line. Read: - Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life https://lnk.to/i3AukBdD - Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletter https://n.pr/3zrFvUB - Our weekly Indicator round-up newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/indicator Follow: - Instagram https://n.pr/3FqLuws - TikTok https://n.pr/3sGZdrq - YouTube https://lnk.to/iCVDaW3C - Facebook https://n.pr/3h92GwS Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. This episode of Planet Money was hosted by Erika Beras and Jeff Guo, it was produced by James Sneed, and edited by Marianne McCune. Sierra Juarez is our fact-checker, and Annlie Huang & Robert Rodriguez engineered the show. Alex Goldmark is the executive producer of Planet Money. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from University of Buffalo, where five decades of AI research is producing advancements that put people first. Tackling real world problems for progress, not profit. Empowering, not replacing. Learn how the University of Buffalo is using AI responsibly to create a better, brighter future for all at buffalo.edu/NPR.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  This is Planet Money from NPR.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  One of the greatest economic experiments in the history of the United States is in for its biggest test yet. It's an experiment that started nearly 100 years ago.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Picture this: the US has rapidly industrialized, millions of people have moved to cities for factory jobs, and all this change is leaving one group of Americans behind: older Americans. By the 1930s, more than half of elderly Americans are living in poverty.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  The problem became particularly acute with the Great Depression. People were calling on the government for help, so President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched a way to give older Americans money every month until they died: Social Security.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  Social Security.

• 1:15Speaker 04

  This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to 30 millions of our citizens.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  This Social Security experiment, it worked. It really, really worked. It rescued lots of older people from extreme poverty. And to this day, it is one of our most popular government programs.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  You probably know how it works. We all have a worker ID for our entire lives, our Social Security number. Every paycheck, we pay a tax that goes into the Social Security trust fund. Then, pretty much immediately, that money that we paid in goes out to retired people, Social Security recipients. And then, when we get older and retire, we become those recipients, while the younger workers keep paying into the program.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  But for the last half of its life, Social Security has kind of been in trouble.

• 2:06Speaker 05

  Social Security has been running cash deficits.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  For years, academics and think tankers and journalists and government actuaries have been sounding the alarm.

• 2:15Speaker 06

  But still, the alarm bells are being raised about the long-term viability.

• 2:19Speaker 07

  And I know we've been hearing this for years.

• 2:21Speaker 05

  The agency continues to face significant financing issues.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  And if you feel like you've heard this before, this, right now, is for real, for real troubles. Very soon, Social Security will actually not have enough money to make full payments to retirees. And the date of doom? It is as soon as 2032, just six years from now.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  And that is largely because of the baby boomers. The boomers are retiring, they are collecting their Social Security payments, and facing a much higher life expectancy than the architects of Social Security imagined nearly a century ago. And there are a lot of them.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  One of those retired boomers is Steve Goss, a guy who used to work for the Social Security Administration himself. He started when he got out of graduate school. He studied math 53 years ago.

• 3:10Speaker 04

  There was a listing for Social Security Administration. They said actuary. And I asked the obvious guy, I said, "What's an actuary?"

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Ah, the same question I asked.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  As it turned out, an actuary was the person who does the math for the administration. And Steve ended up doing that math for 52 years. The last half of those, he was chief actuary. And right now, Steve says, "The math, it is not mathing."

• 3:34Speaker 04

  Social Security is spending more on benefits now than it is taking in in revenue.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  That seems like a problem.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  That is definitely a problem.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Think of Social Security as like a checking account. You need at least as much money going in as going out. When there's more money coming in than going out, like from all the money boomers paid in when they were working, that money sits in what's basically a savings account, the Social Security trust fund, to be used if and when we don't have enough to pay retirees.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  The trust fund is intended to be a bit of a cushion, so that if we do hit a recession, we'll have money to tap into.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  And duh, we did hit a recession.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  So we've been tapping into the trust fund reserve since 2010.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness. We're on borrowed time.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  We are. So we've got 16 years now we've been tapping in to the trust fund reserve. And we've got a few more years available, but it's time that we have to really get moving on making changes to adjust the system.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  And if we don't, in six years, payments to retirees could be cut by 22%.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  22%? That is huge. These are people who are older, who might not have other income and need to pay for food and medical expenses and housing.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  Luckily, people are thinking of ways to solve this problem. There are a lot of proposals out there for how to generate more money for the fund.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  And as a longtime former chief actuary, Steve was the guy Congress would call to crunch the numbers on these proposals.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. When it comes to Social Security, its numbers, its history, the demographics, Steve is like an encyclopedia met a calculator.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  And we at Planet Money love a looming deadline, 2032. So we thought we could go out into the world of people who are proposing solutions to a Social Security bank account that is running out, collect the big ideas, and then come back to Steve. Because for a sober accounting, Steve seems like the perfect person.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  Well, I wouldn't say perfect, but I'm, hopefully, I'm an adequate, OK person.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  OK. Well, you are our adequate, OK person for this mission, man.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  Oh, Erica, I wish you not only luck.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

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  I wish you skill.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erica Barris.

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  And I'm Jeff Guo. Today on the show, this grand economic experiment is in trouble.

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  We're going to look at some of the most talked about possible solutions. Will they help? Will they hurt? And what it will take to refill Social Security's bank account before it all runs out. Because remember Gen X?

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  Uh-oh.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  They're going to be retiring soon, and they will need their checks.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  This message comes from Superhuman. Have you heard of Superhuman Go? Their Go AI chat helps you draft emails and messages and can also summarize long threads and documents.

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  This message comes from Insperity. Because how you HR matters. From payroll and benefits to HR compliance and talent development, helping your business move forward with confidence. Learn more at insperity.com/HRmatters.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  OK, look, the funny thing about Social Security is that we have known for years that it's going to be insolvent at some point in the very near future, that we need to reform it. So why haven't we done anything about it?

• 7:40Speaker 02

  That's because fixing Social Security isn't just a math problem. It's like hard math, but soft skills. Because every potential fix is a political third rail. The big sweeping solutions out there place the burden either on people paying into Social Security now, the workers, or on people who are getting their checks, the retirees.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  Are we more worried about really irritating Social Security beneficiaries with a 22% cut, or somewhat irritating workers with a payroll tax increase?

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Our Douglas Arnold is retired from teaching at Princeton. And yes, Doug also collects Social Security.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  I am well over 70, thank you. I'm six and a half years into it.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  All right. Well, congratulations. After Doug retired, he wrote a book called Fixing Social Security. And Doug's go-to idea for fixing Social Security would definitely put the burden on current workers, not retirees.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  Well, the simplest, most straightforward fit is to simply raise the payroll tax.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. It is obvious. Right now, out of every paycheck, most workers pay 6.2% to Social Security. And our employers, on our behalf, also pay another 6.2%.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  If you raised it from 6.2% to 8.4%, that would solve 100% of the problem over the next 75 years.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  That does not seem simple.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  Well, when I say it's the simplest way, it's not the politically best way.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Uh-huh. Doug says we actually did used to raise the Social Security tax regularly. It started off as 1% back in the 1930s and then kept slowly rising. But after we upped it to 6.2% in the early 80s, that was it. No more increases. We're all still paying the same rate we were paying decades ago.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  And the argument here is that it is in everyone's best interest to raise the Social Security tax rate.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  Even 40-year-old workers start to think, "I'd like Social Security to be there for me, too." And secondly, their parents and their grandparents are on Social Security. So waking up and finding mom and dad just lost nearly a quarter of their Social Security benefits is probably not good news for a 40-year-old worker.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, nobody wants to wake up and find their parents or grandparents saying, "I might need to crash on your couch."

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Raising the payroll tax rate is pretty much the only idea we've found out there that would fix this whole problem all on its own. If we raise the payroll tax enough, our retirees could be golden for at least 75 more years, which is the Social Security Administration's goal for these fixes. But there are kind of sneakier proposals to raise Social Security taxes on people.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Tell me why there's a Social Security poster on the wall behind you. Sure, happy to. I direct the work on Social Security here at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Kathleen Romig told us about a different idea for how to increase the money current workers and their employers are paying into the pot. She says Social Security primarily collects taxes through payroll. But increasingly, there is another way workers get paid. Nowadays, you know, we get a lot of other stuff. I get like a transit benefit at my work or a flexible spending account at my work. But those things are not taxed for Social Security. So.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  We could apply the payroll tax to things like that, just like we do to our 401k contributions.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, all that extra stuff that workers get from their employers, those are called fringe benefits. And they're a way to give workers something without giving them literally a bigger paycheck. And many of these benefits are untaxed. So what if we started taxing them?

• 11:28Speaker 02

  How much would that maybe make us?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  So if the social security payroll tax was expanded to include things like flexible spending accounts and transit benefits, that would close 9% of the gap.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  And that 9%, that's before we even start talking about healthcare. Healthcare costs have more than doubled in the last few decades. And if we started taxing all healthcare premiums as well, that would bump us up to covering 28% of the gap. So this proposal could get us a significant part of the way there.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Then there's a proposal out there that also leans on workers to cover the gap, but not by raising taxes. Instead, it would make workers work longer. For that, we went to Maya McGinnis. Do you remember the very first time you learned about social security?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  In my very first job, which was working at a bakery, until they fired me for eating too much of the fresh meringues. I actually was eating their profits. But my first job at a bakery, I did see that FICA, and I was indeed shocked.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Her shock at that payroll tax, good old FICA, eventually turned to intellectual curiosity. And she has now spent decades thinking about social security. She's with a group called the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  I will collect retirement benefits in nine years.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  It's just- This is personal for you.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  It is personal for all of us. When our time comes, we all want our social security tax.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  Erica, there's nothing I'm looking forward to more.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  I mean, there might be a few things I'm looking forward to. But yes, we want our tax. I asked Maya, give us one idea that could pump some money into the social security trust fund.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  So the change that makes absolute sense is to raise the retirement age. It's absurd that we are living decades longer, and the retirement age has only grown two years since the program started in 1935.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  So when social security started, life expectancy was 60 years old. And you could start getting your benefits when you were 65. Now, life expectancy is 79. Woo. But we've only nudged the full retirement age up a couple of years.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Raising the retirement age would obviously make people work longer and be retired for less time. So that's more money in these social security coffers. Like, if the full retirement age became 69, that change could make up for 15% or more of the social security deficit. But Maya says you'd have to phase it in.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  You'd need to give people time to prepare. So you can't say to a 60-year-old, instead of retiring at 67, you retire at 68.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Oh, that'd be horrible.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Right? You can't do that, like, psych, it's your birthday, but you gotta work for another year. So this is something that you really want to get out ahead of and announce even 10 years before the change starts to go into effect.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  But in addition to making tired workers mad, this would also introduce other problems.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  There are people whose jobs are so much harder and maybe don't want to stay another 10 years doing, like, really grueling construction work.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  And if it is somebody who has a job that is taking a physical toll, it's kind of crazy to think that somebody's going to be able to do that or should do that in their late 60s and early 70s.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  So how is that going to work for them?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  This is the hard stuff.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Also, lower-income workers have a shorter life expectancy. And even though they get a bigger share of their income from social security when they retire, the odds they get there are much lower. So in a lot of ways, Maya says, right now, social security is kind of like a subsidy for the rich. Higher-income workers live longer, so over time, they get more of the money.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Maya says the solution to not making that problem worse is maybe we can create special provisions. Like, if you're working a grueling job, then you should be able to get your benefits earlier.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  And there are other ways to kind of redistribute exactly which workers should pay the price of raising money for the social security trust fund. Like, this next proposal would distribute the cost more to the richest workers.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  See, the way social security works right now is if you earn more than $184,500 a year, you don't have to pay social security tax on any earnings above that. It's like, picture a clock that resets every January 1st.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  So for example, Doug Arnold, the author of Fixing Social Security, he says some Americans make that money in the first couple days of the year. And then the next day, they stop paying into social security for the year. Their social security payment clock just stops.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  For a very rich person, that might come on January 3rd. For your pediatrician, it might come on July 1st. For somebody who just makes $200,000, it comes in November.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  So one proposal is to change that, to tax those people more. Doug says if we got rid of that upper limit, if we taxed high earners more without giving them more benefits when they retire, that would solve about 2/3 of the deficit.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  And this is a pretty popular proposal. Politicians and the internet, they love talking about this. And that maxing out number, $184,500, all the time. Why would they have picked that number?

• 16:47Speaker 04

  Well, of course, they didn't pick that number. They picked the number $3,000.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Back in the 1930s, rich people were defined as anyone who made more than $3,000 a year. Wow, inflation. That was around 3% of Americans. So they made that the maximum taxable wage.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  So it started as $3,000.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Pulling up all your charts. I love this.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  That's right. Then it went up. Congress would just periodically say, oh, gee, we should raise that maximum taxable wage base again.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Eventually, in the 70s, they pegged the increases to wage inflation. But Doug says since then, some people's salaries have grown way more than the average wage has grown.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  The amount of salary income that is untaxed by social security is now about three times greater than it used to be. And that's because of wage inequality, that basically the rich are richer today. They're not just rich like they used to be. Like, they're really, really rich.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  The way social security works now, the more money you make over your working years, the more social security you get in retirement, up to a maximum, a limit. And there's a minimum, too. So if you didn't make a lot over your working years, you still get that minimum payment.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  And Doug says you can play with how much payroll tax you collect from which categories of people. Or you can lower or reduce benefits for the richer people who are more likely to also have other forms of retirement accounts.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  So this fix, which leans on the richest workers, could definitely relieve some of the problem. How much depends on how you want to strike the balance. Now, Doug did tell us about one more possible fix. This is one that wouldn't involve leaning on current workers at all. In fact, in this fix, the retirees bear the brunt.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Right now, those retired people's social security payments are pegged to the Consumer Price Index.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  The Consumer Price Index goes out and they check every month what the price of gasoline is in a bunch of different markets.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  They do the little basket of goods. And it's like, oh, this is how much we think milk costs, and this is how much this is. But there are other indexes out there that could make the social security program cheaper for the government. So why not use those? Like, a chained price index. That would take more into consideration how seniors actually spend money, like, what choices they make.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  This chained price index is the solution Republicans have proposed. Democrats have suggested using another one, the Consumer Price Index for the elderly. But Doug is like, we could also just create a whole new one.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Why not invent a truly accurate gauge and leave it at that?

• 19:36Speaker 02

  One way or another, giving a little less to today's retirees doesn't seem entirely unfair. Boomers are the richest generation. Like, right now, they hold half of all the household wealth, even though they're less than 20% of the US population. And they are also much more likely than current workers to have some other cushions in their retirement, like pensions, which used to be a lot more common.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  But on the flip side, of course, recent numbers show that a lot of retirees really need their social security. Last year, it kept nearly 29 million Americans out of poverty.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  After the break, a fix that doesn't reduce payments to retirees, but also wouldn't increase taxes on today's American workers. Plus, we go back to our former chief actuary for a reality check.

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• 21:49Speaker 02

  There is one more idea that wouldn't cost American earners more, and it also wouldn't cost retirees more. And that one came from Kathleen Romig.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Kathleen, talk to us about a problem we haven't really mentioned yet, that Americans are having a lot fewer babies. And the big idea she brought up to fix it is immigration, allowing more of it. You know, social security is a pay-as-you-go program, so why not have more workers paying into it? We're at net zero immigration right now, and that means fewer workers-

• 22:23Speaker 06

  Workers contributing to this really important program than we used to.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  So in order to fix Social Security, more immigration.

• 22:31Speaker 06

  Right. So if you look at the Social Security Trustees Report just this last year, it showed explicitly that because of lower levels of immigration, the financing gap has gotten bigger. And the reverse is true. If we had higher levels of immigration, the financing problem would shrink. It's just math.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  The fertility rate in the US is currently below replacement level. And even if a baby boom just suddenly magically happened, those babies would be busy being babies, goo goo gaga, and a couple decades from paying into the program.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  So why not allow more working age people into the country right now, who could be paying into Social Security and helping to reduce the deficit?

• 23:10Speaker 02

  So when we eventually went back to our former chief actuary, our Social Security Calculator, Steve Goss, we had this long list of ideas to talk with him about. And every one of them, he's already heard, plus some others.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh, probably hundreds.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, these are not just ideas he's heard, but ideas he has seriously considered. These are all versions of proposals that members of Congress and economists have been talking about and that Steve has done the actual math on. Though he wants to make it clear he no longer speaks for the Social Security Administration in any way. He's just a guy who's thought about this a lot.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  And his take is unless Congress dares to adopt a full 2.2 percentage point tax hike on workers, plus 2.2 more from employers, which we will add might possibly make them the least popular people of all time, but would solve the whole problem all at once. Unless they make that move, the only way we can make up the deficit at this point is through some combination of ideas. Nothing is off the table.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  And Steve is not partial to any one specific idea. It's more like, yes, do everything. It's up to the American people. Like, more immigration? He's like, sure.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  Yes, historically, no question that positive net immigration has been a plus for the United States. It's almost like having had a higher birth rate 25 or 30 years ago.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  And Steve also says, yeah, sure, getting rid of the maximum earnings cap would help. Everyone, no matter how much you make, could keep paying into Social Security.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Basically, around the range of about 60% of the long range shortfall could be eliminated by simply eliminating the taxable maximum.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Also, Steve says, raising the age at which people can collect full Social Security would help.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  This has actually been a proposal that's been put forth, studied, and some would argue makes sense. It's a provision C 1.3.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  You are an encyclopedia, I will say.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  Steve says you could also do this in a more equitable way. You could stagger retirement ages based on how much people earn. So you could retire earlier, maybe, if you earn lower wages.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  How feasible would it be to actually implement this?

• 25:23Speaker 04

  Very feasible. I'm in Social Security, you're already receiving all the information. It needs to be able to affect us if it were enacted.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  So basically, Steve says yes to any and all the proposals and others we haven't talked about. Because he already knows from past experience that if you want to fix this Social Security deficit long term, you have to do a lot. And he knows from past experience, your math has to be solid.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. You see, back in the 1980s, Congress did make a bunch of changes. At the time, Social Security was running a deficit. And to fix it, among other things, Congress raised the retirement age and the Social Security tax. Plus, they had already changed the way they calculated the maximum taxable earnings to keep up with increases in average wages. And they thought that all of these changes would be a long term fix. They thought those fixes could keep the program afloat for at least another 75 years.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  You were there in 1983.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  I was indeed.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  But Steve says two things happened that nobody anticipated.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  One is a labor trend. As projected, we got richer, we're making mad money. But not as projected. Some people are making way more than others. Back in 1983, they didn't expect that some people's salary would grow by so much.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  Well, we had not anticipated there would be this level of shift in earnings.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  If Congress had known, they might have figured out a way to raise the maximum taxable salary by a lot more. Another thing Steve says no one saw coming was the 2008 recession.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  We were expecting the economy would be rolling along. There'd be ups and downs and all kinds of stuff. And typically, when there's a recession, it's fairly brief. And then the recovery is fairly brief. It was a 10 year recovery for that recession.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  So long, so long.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, so long.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, employment was lower, earnings were depressed. And obviously, that meant less money coming into the Social Security Trust Fund.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  And the third thing Steve says they were wrong about was the fertility rate. They thought couples would continue having about two children on average.

• 27:33Speaker 04

  In fact, it did not stay at two. We're now actually below that level.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  Steve says to fix the big Social Security problem, you have to be willing to keep adjusting your math. And he says, the longer we wait to fix it, the worse this problem will be. Because this great economic experiment just doesn't have any quick fix solutions.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  We tried a few last ditch ideas of our own on Steve. Like, why can't we just grab some cash from the Treasury's funds and put it in the Social Security vaults? You know, like a bailout.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  Well, unfortunately, the Treasury's vaults are not really so much as having a pile of money that are available. It's sort of the other way around.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  It's a little depleted at the moment.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  It has debt, yep.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, but even if the US government wasn't $40 trillion in debt, we just can't. Legally, the Social Security program isn't allowed to borrow from anywhere other than the Disability Trust Fund.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  OK, OK, fine, laws, whatever. There is, though, one last idea we wanted to ask Steve about before we accepted his overarching message that the solution is going to be complicated and multifaceted and a bunch of intertwined policies, yada, yada, and not some snap of the fingers.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Our last shot at an easy fix? If there are still today a couple trillion dollars left in the trust fund, why not invest? Put that money in the stock market. Watch that Social Security Trust Fund multiply. Social Security is famously not invested in the market. But if it were, there might be a higher rate of return, right? Like, more money for everyone.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  And, OK, Steve was like, this is a pretty great idea. And even though this would mean the US would be a majority stakeholder in a lot of private industries, the US did, in fact, talk about this idea a bunch in the 1990s. But they didn't do it. And now, if we were to do it, there actually wouldn't be enough benefit because the fund is depleted. We are spending it down every single day.

• 29:38Speaker 04

  We don't have enough money in the trust funds to be able to make that difference. Now, if we had done, for example, what Canada did.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  Canada, back in the 1990s, did make this move. And as it happens, that investment fund has grown since the 1990s to the point now, where I was just talking with the folks in Canada recently, their trust fund that has been built up with equities is now equal in size to 25% of their gross domestic product.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  So that was a wise move, and they have much benefited from it. In fact, they've recently dropped their payroll tax rate for the Canadian Pension Plan a little bit because of the good returns in that investment fund.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  So, yeah, good idea, but too late for us Americans. But wow, good on you, Canada. Good on you. Happy for you.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  You know, Erica, they say the best time to save for retirement is 25 years ago.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  That is literally what they say.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  But the next best time is today.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  We could start, we could try, but we really can't, is the problem. We really can't. Sorry.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  And before we go, a plug for our recent bonus episode for NPR Plus supporters that is all about NPR Plus supporters. Where your money goes, what it means to NPR and Planet Money, and how our corner of the podcast economy works. If you're ever wondering about podcast subscriptions, what the finances look like under the hood, or why we ask you so often to join NPR Plus, you'll like this episode. We're looking at you, Planet Money subreddit. And as always, if you have questions, feedback, or ideas for a future bonus episode, get in touch. Email us at [email protected] and toss us in the subject line.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  This episode of Planet Money was produced by James Sneed and edited by Mary Ann McKeon. Sarah Juarez is our fact checker. And Anli Huang and Robert Rodriguez engineered the show. Alex Goldmark is the executive producer of Planet Money.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Big thank you to Nancy Altman and Romina Baccia. I'm Erica Barris.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  And I'm Jeff Guo. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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