5 days ago
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Musk's Playbook Won't Do for Social Security
Your editorial 'The Social Security Iceberg Gets Closer' (June 20) rightly warns that delaying reform will make eventual fixes more difficult and painful. Effective solutions don't require gutting benefits or indulging political theater about fraud.
One idea is to modernize the benefit formula to target assistance better. Social Security must protect those with lower lifetime earnings, but the program can be made more progressive by slightly slowing benefit growth for higher-income retirees, many of whom live longer and collect more. Increasing the number of working years used to calculate benefits would also improve incentives to work at older ages and help reduce the program's shortfall.
