The plan undermines the core purpose of SS---snowballs to unrelated enforcement that wrecks broader enforcement.
Favreault ’18 [Melissa M. and Richard W. Johnson; April; senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, studies social insurance and social assistance programs and has written extensively about Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and Supplemental Security Income, BA in political science and Russian from Amherst College, and her MA and PhD in sociology from Cornell University; senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where he directs the Program on Retirement Policy, AB from Princeton University and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, both in economics; “Paying for Parental Leave with Future Social Security Benefits,” Washington, DC: Urban Institute, https://www.urban.org/research/publication/paying-parental-leave-futuresocial-security-benefits]
Using Social Security to finance parental leave benefits raises fundamental questions about the Social Security system itself. It was designed as a social insurance program to provide basic retirement income and insure people against the financial risks associated with becoming widowed, orphaned, or disabled. Allowing people to borrow against their future retirement benefits to meet needs at younger ages would fundamentally change the program from a social insurance program to a forced saving program. Allowing people to use future Social Security benefits to finance parental leave could invite proposals to use the program to meet other pressing needs. Representative Tom Garrett (R-VA), for example, has proposed that people could pay off part of their student loan debt by accepting reduced future Social Security benefits. Diverting Social Security to cover nonretirement needs could significantly erode retirement security.