Joe Biden has achieved several of the promises he made during the 2020 presidential campaign. He worked with Congress to pass a major infrastructure bill. He nominated the first African American woman to the U.S. Supreme Court. Medicare can now negotiate the prices of high-cost prescription drugs.
Those are a few of the biggies Biden has checked off the list. But there are still plenty of campaign promises that haven't been fulfilled so far. Putting Social Security on a path to long-term solvency ranks as one of the most important incomplete objectives.
However, there's still some time remaining in Biden's first presidential term. He also hopes to win reelection to, in his words, "finish this job."
And Biden now has a reason to be at least a little encouraged about the potential for moving forward with his plan to bolster Social Security. His biggest proposed Social Security change could be more likely to happen than ever with this latest news.
Image source: Getty Images.
What Biden wants to do
Several of the proposals that Biden made when he ran for president in 2020 would increase Social Security's costs rather than put the program on a firmer financial footing. For example, he called for directly increasing benefits in several ways. Biden also argued for changing the inflation metric used to calculate cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs).
Biden did promote one major Social Security reform, though, that would go a long way toward making the federal program solvent. He campaigned on a promise to make all earnings above $400,000 subject to the payroll taxes that help fund Social Security.
The current payroll tax maximum is $160,200. Biden's proposal would create a "doughnut hole" where earnings between that level and $400,000 would not be subject to the Social Security payroll tax. Over time, that "doughnut hole" would shrink as the payroll tax maximum gradually increases.
In 2022, the University of Maryland's Program for Public Consultation analyzed several Social Security proposals. It calculated that making all wages above $400,000 subject to the payroll tax would eliminate around 61% of the projected Social Security shortfall.
What Americans think
So what's the latest news that could make Biden's biggest proposed Social Security change more likely to happen? Americans appear to be behind his idea.
Nationwide Insurance recently teamed up with The Harris Poll to conduct a Social Security survey. The most striking finding from this survey was that 75% of Americans aged 50 and older stated that they're worried about Social Security running out of funding during their lifetime.
But what should especially encourage the president is the responses to how Americans think that Social Security needs to be fixed. Nearly half of survey respondents (49%) expressed the view that taxes should be increased on higher earners to bolster the program.
This was by far the top solution for addressing Social Security's problems in the eyes of the individuals surveyed. The second most popular answer was to increase employer taxes, with 41% of survey respondents favoring the proposal.
Other ideas to fix Social Security that have been put forward received much less support. For example, only 19% of survey respondents wanted to increase the full retirement age.
The dynamics of Social Security reform
Social Security is sometimes called "the third rail of American politics." As with the third rail that conducts the electricity that powers subway systems, touch it and you die (politically, in this case).
Every politician in Washington, D.C. knows that something must be done to avoid future Social Security benefit cuts. Most, if not all, of them also understand that any significant reforms to Social Security must first gain broad public support. If too few Americans support a given proposal to fix Social Security, it won't pick up enough votes in Congress.
Will the recent Nationwide survey be enough to push Biden's Social Security payroll tax change across the finish line? Probably not on its own. Whether or not Biden adds this Social Security reform to his list of accomplishments remains to be seen.
However, politicians pay attention to such surveys. The fact that Americans seem to favor this potential solution above others makes it more likely to gain traction on Capitol Hill and therefore more likely to eventually be implemented.
