Comparing the Impacts of Social Security Benefit Reductions on the Income Distribution of the Elderly

Wade Pfau

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Benefit reductions will likely be a part of the eventual Social Security reform in the United States. This research attempts to quantify the intragenerational and intergenerational impacts of different benefit reduction proposals on the incomes of the elderly. Reforms include across-the-board benefit cuts, price indexing, and reductions to the cost-of-living adjustment. Restoring the projected seventy-five year balance for the Trust Fund through benefit reductions will significantly lower benefits, though the impacts vary by type of reform. Nonetheless, the savings for the Social Security Trust Fund will exceed the accompanying increases in the poverty gap, leaving room to provide minimal income guarantees.

Keywords: Social Security; price indexing; cost-of-living adjustment; poverty; benefit reductions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H31 H55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-06
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in National Tax Journal 2.LIX(2006): pp. 195-210

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/19033/1/MPRA_paper_19033.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:19033

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().