THE END IS NEAR

Ralph Bristol

by Ralph Bristol, reposted from Facebook, July 2, 2025 -The insolvency of the Social Security and Medicare Trust funds is the single most predictable (and long-predicted) fiscal crisis in the history of the United States.  

Shortly after the Greenspan Commission, appointed by President Reagan, “saved” Social Security by raising the payroll tax, taxing benefits for the first time (in a means-tested way) and gradually raising the standard retirement age from 65 to 67, the trustees have released annual predictions about how long the Reagan rescue would last. 

The projected insolvency date has not changed much over the last four decades. It did change by one year recently, after a government-orchestrated dance with inflation, blamed on Covid-19 triggered the biggest monthly COLA increase since Reagan's dogged inflation. 

And now, the end is near. And so, we face the final curtain. My friends, I’ll say it clear. I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain. 

If President Trump doesn’t do it, and it appears unlikely that he will, the next president will do something about it, either in his first or second term. He won’t be able to avoid it. The end will not be near. It will be here. 

That assumes we have not already defaulted on our debt by then and the unstoppable force of the U.S. credit worthiness will be stopped by the immovable object of a bond market that slices up our credit card, which the silly monetary money theory people think has no limit. 

If he does it in his first term, he will do it expecting to be a one-term president, which makes it more likely that he will do it in his second term, which could make it more expensive for us – both those who pay for and those who receive the benefits. 

The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial this morning, wrote “If lawmakers acted tomorrow, restoring Social Security’s long-term solvency would require a 22% benefit cut for current and future beneficiaries, a payroll tax increase to 16%, up from the current 12%, or a combination of benefit cuts and tax hikes. If we waited until the trust fund was depleted, we would have to cut benefits by nearly 26%, or the payroll tax would have to rise to nearly 17%.”

NEITHER OF THOSE WILL HAPPEN

Because this was the most predictable economic fiscal crisis in history, I started warning about it when I first noticed it, which was when Jim DeMint was first running for Congress.  He and I created separate plans to reform Social Security by slowly transforming it from a pension system to a 401(k)-type system.  Only two people reading this, Marianna Leahy and Rick Tate, will remember that. 

In my plan, the same amount of money would be extracted from paychecks, and it would be mandatory, just like payroll taxes, but eventually, it would all go into a 401(k) plan instead of a pension plan.  I would have phased it in over 20 years to accommodate people who were closer to retirement at that time.  

DeMint’s plan was much less aggressive than mine, never converting completely into a 401(k)-type plan - always remaining a hybrid.  The Heritage Foundation, former President Bush, and a lot of states adopted something close to DeMint’s plan and ran with it, but 9-11 ended all talk of reforming Social Security– probably forever.  

The system is too close to insolvency to reform without increasing our nearly $2 trillion annual deficit to $3 instantly, and that would hasten the explosion of the debt bomb, the fuse of which is lit, but no-one knows it’s length, and no-one has had the courage, so far, to jump on it. 

When I introduced my plan to reform Social Security, I also predicted what would happen if we didn’t. That prediction has not changed.  I predicted that rather than significantly reducing benefits or increasing payroll taxes, Congress would simply convert Social Security into a partial welfare system, supported both by the flatter payroll tax and the increasingly progressive income tax, with more and more burden placed on the income tax. 

Instead of either reducing benefits 22% or increasing payroll by 17%, Congress will make up most of the difference with higher income taxes on an increasingly narrow band of the nation’s wealthy and even more borrowing, which will hasten the next, and much bigger crisis, the explosion of the debt bomb. 

Yes, there were times I'm sure they knew, they bit off more than they could chew. But through it all when there was doubt, they chewed it up and spit it out.  The record shows, they dodged the blow, and kicked it your way.

Ralph Bristol is the former long-time morning talk radio host broadcasting on  Supertalk 99.7 WTN. He left talk radio in 2018 and retired. He lives in Nashville. 

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