Okay.

And then, and then why, right? So the way Social Security works is the payroll taxes go in.

As you said, it's about 12.4% split between worker and employer.

Those payroll taxes immediately go to pay benefits for current seniors.

The idea is those two should be roughly in balance, right? The amount going in should roughly match the amount going out.

When there's a little bit of extra, they put it in a trust fund.

Um, when we're a little bit short, we draw from that trust fund.

Yeah

So thanks for being us, Mark, uh, with us, Mark, and please tell us, uh, what your question is for our debaters.

Yeah.

Tha- uh, thank you so much for having me on, and this is a very interesting debate.

Um, but in some ways it's very academic because the reality is we're not going to phase out Social Security.

Seems very unlikely.

And the other reality is we are not gonna keep Social Security how it is.

Very unlikely.

Um, what, what is the prediction on that? When, when do we see that? Unless something changes, when does that happen, Mark?

How, how are you seeing the remedies, and, and are there any clear opportunities to do this without inflicting any pain on anyone today, tomorrow, and in the future?

Right.

So there is a gap that's equal to about a quarter of benefits between how much we're taking in in revenue and how much we're spending out.

And so really, you know, Social Security doesn't have a lot of fraud, it doesn't have a lot of administrative costs.

So really, to close that gap, we either need to reduce our scheduled benefits, increase our scheduled revenue, or some combination.

Now, if we were smart and we did this, say, 15 or 25 years ago, we could've done it in a way that everybody's benefits keeps growing, maybe just a little bit slower than otherwise they would.

We're probably past that point.

I know you saw Senator Cassidy, and you've s- looked at all these proposals, but what do you, what, what are your thoughts?

In the past, has this happened, and how has it been addressed in the past to extend the solvency?

Yeah, so we've had two times in the past that we've approached insolvency in 1977 and 1983.

And both times in different ways, policymakers came together and they enacted a set of fixes.

We raised the retirement age.

We increased the amount of income subject to the cap.

We changed the payroll tax.

We brought more people onto the program.

Problem is, well, we have the midterms looming, and if the party who is in charge remains in charge, we see program cuts as their idea as far as what's left to be cut other than, again, money to the beneficiaries.

When economists worry about us carrying debt larger than the economy, what are they actually worried about?

There's no magic that happens when your debt goes from 99% of GDP to 101% of GDP.

What this is symbolic of is a debt that's running away from us.

Countries, especially rich countries, can borrow.

It's often healthy to borrow, in fact, to fight recessions, to spread out the cost of emergencies over time, to make investments.

The challenge is when your borrowing is rising faster than your capacity to hold it, and that's what debt to GDP basically measures.

It measures how big is our debt relative to our capacity to hold it, and what we're seeing is that debt is starting to run away from us.

Marc, what I'm wondering, is, is there a point, or are we already past it, where the national deficit starts affecting ordinary life here in America?