The Honorable Joseph R. Biden
The White House
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear President Biden:
The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare is a membership organization whose mission is to protect, preserve, promote, and ensure the financial security, health, and the well-being of current and future generations of maturing Americans. With millions of members and supporters across America, we are the nation’s second-largest grassroots citizens organization devoted to the retirement future of all citizens.
As you formally submit your legislative and budgetary priorities for Fiscal Year 2025 to Congress and the American public, we strongly urge you to include a robust expansion of Social Security and provisions to extend the program’s solvency among your recommendations.
As you well know, Social Security and Medicare provide seniors with crucial financial and health security. Seniors’ earned benefits are “sacred obligations” with origins in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty. Social Security is an enormously successful program which is essential to the retirement security of the vast majority of Americans.
The National Committee believes it is vitally important that Social Security’s financial foundation be strengthened and that the benefits offered by the program be improved to more effectively meet the needs of all Americans. The last time Congress enacted legislation improving benefits was in 1972, over one-half century ago. Since that time, the value of benefits has eroded, leaving working American families shouldering more of the financial burden of retirement at a time of stagnating wages and a widening wealth gap.
It is well past time to remedy this situation. There are many examples of needed benefit improvements, including those you have proposed in the past. We believe a package of enhancements such as those included in Representative John Larson’s H.R. 4583, the Social Security 2100 Act would go a long way toward restoring the financial security provided by this earned benefit program for America’s families.
We also strongly support your commitment to ensuring the long-term solvency of Social Security without cutting benefits for current or future retirees and their families. We applaud your previous proposal to ensure that high-wage Americans pay the same taxes on those earnings that middle-class families pay by reinstating the payroll tax for higher wage levels. We urge you to include this proposal in your budget proposal to Congress.
In addition, we recognize that income patterns for our nation’s workforce have evolved over the years, with higher-income workers today receiving increasingly smaller portions of their income from wages compared with income from investments. For this reason, we support modifying the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT) for higher-income workers and depositing the additional revenue into the Social Security Trust Funds. We believe these two provisions will allow you to maintain your commitment not to raise taxes on individuals earning under $400,000 a year while still generating needed revenue for America’s future retirees.
Finally, if additional revenue is needed to both enhance benefits and ensure long-term solvency for this critical program, we believe it is appropriate to consider supporting small, incremental increases to the payroll tax rate stretched out over long periods of time for individuals with annual income over $400,000. We believe it is fair that well off Americans pay a little more into Social Security in order to help guarantee that full benefits for all can be paid well into the future.
We believe measures such as these will provide needed updates and improvements to Social Security that the American people deserve while at the same time ensuring Social Security’s long-term solvency. We look forward to working with you and Congress to strengthen Social Security’s “sacred obligations”.
Sincerely,
Max Richtman
President and CEO