Biden peddles bogus math on Social Security

The Biden White House is leaning heavily into a very specific reelection strategy: use X to announce a policy proposal that makes no sense and that you have no intention of passing and hope the media don't ever point out that your policy makes no sense.

Vice President Kamala Harris , for instance, promised $10-a-day day care amid widespread reports on how the Canadian experiment with this was going horrifically bad:

President Joe Biden promised to let the expiring Tax Cuts and Jobs Act disappear forever, not acknowledging that this was a massive middle-class tax hike .

This month, Biden claimed he was going to close the budgetary shortfall of Social Security and Medicare by taxing the rich.

This would be impossible — mathematically impossible. The only way to close the shortfalls of those programs is by hiking everyone's taxes or cutting benefits, whether through massive inflation or statutory changes to the program.

Manhattan Institute budget scholar Brian Riedl has made this case consistently for years.

Biden is tapping into a popular and false belief that the Social Security shortfall can be closed by removing the cap on Social Security taxes. See this CBS News headline , for instance: "One way to fix Social Security? 'Smash the cap.'"

The cap is the point at which workers stop earning Social Security benefits, and so they stop paying Social Security taxes on every dollar earned. It's about $168,000, and it goes up every year with inflation. This cap reflects the idea that Social Security benefits are not welfare but are earned benefits.

Smashing the cap will raise federal revenues, but it will also transform Social Security into a welfare program. Also, it won't raise enough money to fill the funding gap — Social Security tax revenues will still be far, far short of Social Security benefits paid out.

In the long run, eliminating the cap would leave almost two-thirds of the funding gap unfilled, the Social Security Administration calculates .

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Biden will not actually introduce a bill to uncap Social Security because he knows it won't make Social Security solvent — and because he knows he can do what every other president does and just leave the problem for future generations.

But this faux policy proposal allows him to portray his party as the populist party and portray Republicans as the party of the rich. It's populist demagoguery he expects he won't be caught for.