As everyone argues about the $40 trillion debt threshold, remember: Its 100% the other party's fault. Your side has never hiked spending or cut taxes. And if they did it was for a good reason and paid for itself. And we can fix deficits entirely by going after the bad people.

Showing that "uncapping the payroll tax does not fully fund Social Security" is easy and requires no complicated models or "just trust me." Its basic math you can verify yourself. CBO projects Social Security to level off at: - Spending around 6.0-6.2% of GDP. - Dedicated tax revenues of 4.5% of GDP (from 4.2% in payroll taxes plus 0.3% in other small taxes). Yet we also know that SocSec's payroll tax covers 83% of all wages. Eliminating the cap would cover 100%. So if covering 83% collects 4.2% of GDP in payroll taxes ... then covering 100% would collect 4.2/0.83=5.06% of GDP in payroll taxes. Add back that 0.3% of GDP from related taxes, and we're at 5.36% of GDP in Social Security revenues. That covers half of the funding gap (see chart). (We're giving the rosiest scenario, so let's ignore that a tax hike of this size would give back some revenues from disincentives - and we're also canceling any earned benefits from these taxes). That's it. That's the math you can verify yourself. The key calculation is that the current payroll tax catches 83% of wages and collects 4.2% of GDP. So you can calculate what a 100% policy would collect (an additional 0.86%) and compare to the spending projections. So, no, "eliminate the cap, problem solved" is not correct. You still have to address benefits and the eligibility age.