Donn Janes for Congress - Social Security

Our Federal budget for 2010 includes 2.2 Trillion dollars in mandatory (entitlement) spending (Source). If we are to ever have a balanced budget and attempt to reduce or National debt we must address entitlement spending.

Social Security makes up nearly 20% of our annual budget. Once the baby boomer generation begins to retire, the Social Security rolls will swell and we will, for the first time, have more people receiving funds from Social Security than are paying into the system. This is unsustainable and needs to be addressed today.

I do believe that we need to keep our promise to those who are relying on Social Security for their retirement, but we must make the hard choices to fix Social Security and potentially move future contributors and recipients off of the Social Security rolls.

There is a solution to this problem and a way forward that would not significantly impact recipients or those tax payers who would be supporting the program. First we would need to repeal the law that allows Congress to spend the surpluses received by the Social Security Trust Fund. This will plug the hole and make Social Security a protected fund once again.

Second we need to abolish the Income Tax and Payroll taxes replacing them with a consumption tax. This would broaden the tax base and provide more taxpayers to fund Social Security and our government. A consumption tax has many other benefits, one of the most noteworthy is that it would grow the economy and increase the size of the tax base even further. This would also eventually wean tax payers off of the entitlement based retirement plan and move them towards a saving plan of their own.