If former President Donald Trump wins the November election and institutes his planned agenda, the Social Security Trust Fund may be empty in just six years, according to a new report.
The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), which opposes large federal deficits, said in their report released on Monday that Vice President Kamala Harris’s proposed policies wouldn’t change the current timeline.
As the US is aging, the funding of the program will come into sharper focus as the current prediction by trustees that the fund will become insolvent in 2035 gets closer.
The CRFB found that Trump’s policies would bring that deadline closer by a magnitude of years. The group found that many of his proposed policies for a second term push the fund towards insolvency.
CRFB’s senior policy director Marc Goldwein noted that the group didn’t create a similar report on Harris’s policies because of the marginal effect they would have on the program.
“I can’t think of anything that would be this order of magnitude,” compared to earlier campaigns, Goldwein said, according to The Washington Post.
“The so-called experts at CRFB have been consistently wrong throughout the year,” Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the paper, adding that Trump’s policies would “put Social Security on a stronger footing for generations to come.” She also claimed that a Harris presidency would harm the program because of unchecked illegal immigration.
Trump has promised that beneficiaries of Social Security would have to pay federal income taxes. This is the single most harmful proposed policy, according to the report. About 40 percent of current recipients pay taxes on some parts of their Social Security. The tax collected goes back into the fund – removing the tax could cost the program $1tn over a decade, the report stated.
The CRFB also stated that Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants could cost the fund hundreds of millions of dollars as many undocumented people have payroll taxes removed from their pay for the fund, but they’re never eligible to receive any benefits.
Trump’s proposal to institute high tariffs on all imports could be harmful to the fund in several ways, the organization said.
Experts on Wall Street have suggested that the tariffs could push high inflation, meaning that Social Security would have to pay out more money because of cost of living adjustments.
The CRFB also noted that Trump’s promise to end taxes on tips or income earned during overtime could also be damaging to the fund. If Trump removes the taxes funding Social Security and Medicare, it could cost the program between $150m to more than $1tn over 10 years. The group said that the likeliest outcome would be on the higher end of that scale.
The CRFB predicts in the report that under the Trump policies, the program with reach the point where it has to cut benefits in 2031 or the following year. Congress could change the law governing the cuts, but if it doesn’t, the cuts would increase from the currently projected 23 percent on all checks to around 33 percent.
