Endless conflict over Social Security expansion means the plan causes delay and conflict within Congress

Social Security is back in the news. Some Republicans are angling to reduce benefits, while Democrats are posing as the valiant saviors of the popular program. The end result, most likely, is that nothing will happen. We have seen this story before, because this is roughly where the politics of Social Security have been stuck for about forty years. It’s a problem because the system truly does need repair, and the endless conflict between debt-obsessed Republicans and stalwart Democrats will not generate the progressive reforms we need. More than any other single institution, Social Security keeps the United States from becoming a truly Dickensian world of poverty and despair. Social Security, believe it or not, has a utopian heart: the idea that all Americans deserve a life of dignity and public support once they become old or disabled. This vision does, for now, remain utopian: many Americans are right to worry that, without savings or private pensions, their older years will be just as precarious and austere as their younger ones. Social Security is nonetheless the lynchpin of the U.S. welfare system, such as it is. In 2022 some $1.2 trillion flowed from the system to nearly 66 million people. Most of those people are retired workers, but not all of them. Millions are the spouses or dependents of retired workers; millions more are disabled people, or the spouses or dependents of the disabled. All in all, about one in four Americans over the age of eighteen receives benefits from Social Security. If not for Social Security, almost 40 percent of older Americans would be living in poverty. It is not going too far to say that the Social Security system, more than any other single institution, keeps the United States from becoming a truly Dickensian world of poverty and despair. Yet it has serious downsides, too. For one thing, benefits are low; even after much-needed cost-of-living increases, the average recipient will receive just over $21,000 per year. And for another, the Social Security trust fund will run dry in about twelve years, prompting an immediate benefit drop of about 20 percent (there is no realistic scenario in which benefits disappear altogether). For a middle-class family, that difference might not matter all that much, but for an elderly and disabled widow, already near the poverty line, it would be devastating. You probably already know most of this. Indeed, it’s become conventional wisdom that the Social Security system is in trouble and shouldn’t be counted on. How many times have you heard people scoff about their Social Security taxes or warn a younger coworker their benefits will never materialize? This shrugging nihilism might make sense for the wealthier among us, many of whom are indulging in the distinctly American ritual of creating an entrepreneurial plan for our looming disability and death. But the majority of Americans don’t have 401(k)s, and many millions, especially the poor and people of color, will rely on Social Security as their main source of retirement income. Despite this dire situation, there has not been a congressional vote, even in committee, on major reforms to Social Security since 1983. This has not been for lack of trying, at least among Democrats. In both the House and the Senate, there are serious bills, with significant support, to salvage the program. The most well-developed, known as Social Security 2100, has more than 200 cosponsors in the House. It’s an audacious bill, planning to expand Social Security benefits for the first time since the 1970s, focusing especially on the caregiving workforce. And in the Senate, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have put forth an even more ambitious plan, which would raise taxes and benefits while expanding the program’s solvency for decades. Still, the odds of anything happening with these bills are low, at least for now. In addition to the expected Republican intransigence, Democrats themselves are not united. The relevant division is between a politics of incrementalism and a politics of bold reform and expansion. Social Security 2100 is on the less ambitious end of the spectrum, especially as it has recently been rewritten to keep Biden’s promise of not raising taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. As such, the bill does little to address the solvency issue. The Social Security Expansion Act in the Senate is bolder and does more to address both equity and solvency—but few Democratic senators have cosponsored the bill, leaving it oceans away from the required votes.