While many chuckle over Paul Ryan getting booed at the AARP conference – and sure, that is funny – President Obama actually made some news in his appearance. Because it’s a year divisible by four, he returned to a progressive idea on Social Security that he endorsed in his last campaign.

President Barack Obama revived a 2008 campaign promise on Friday, telling the crowd at an AARP forum that he would be open to raising the level of income on which Americans pay Social Security taxes.

“You know, I do think that looking at changing the cap is an important aspect of putting Social Security on a more stable footing,” Obama said, via satellite feed. “And what I’ve said is, is that I’m willing to work with Republicans and examine all their ideas, but what I’m not going to do, as a matter of principle, is to slash benefits or privatize Social Security and suddenly turn it over to Wall Street — because we saw what could happen back in 2008 and 2009 when the stock market crashed, and we are still recovering from that.”

You’ll notice that he really hit opposition to privatization hard, which isn’t really on the table at the moment.

As you know, we have a payroll tax cap, currently at around $110,000 . Someone making that amount pays the same in Social Security payroll taxes as the highest-paid CEO in America.

When Obama first looked at this in 2008, he suggested a kind of doughnut hole. You would exempt payroll taxes from $110,000 to $250,000, and then lift the cap on all income above that. This would provide enough revenue to cover most of the 75-year shortfall in the Social Security program. You could probably adjust that doughnut hole downward,

Read more http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FdlNewsDesk/~3/_pWfbwO1FTA/