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Commentary: Social Security is still in good shape but faces challenges — from Trump
The annual reports of the Social Security and Medicare trustees provide yearly opportunities for misunderstandings by politicians, the media, and the general public about the health of these programs. This year is no exception.
A case in point is the response by House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.) to the Social Security and Medicare trustees’ projections about the depletion of the programs’ reserves: “Doing nothing to address the solvency of these programs will result in an immediate, automatic, and catastrophic cut to benefits for the nearly 70 million seniors who rely on them.”
The reports say nothing about an “immediate” cut to benefits. They talk about cuts that might happen in 2034 and 2033, when there still would be enough money coming in to pay 89% of scheduled Medicare benefits and 81% of scheduled Social Security benefits.
The Trump administration’s actions are weakening the country’s economic outlook and Social Security’s financial footing.
— Kathleen Romig, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
House Ways and Means Committee chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) used the release of the reports to plump for the budget resolution that the House narrowly passed on orders from President Trump and that is currently being masticated by several Senate committees.
The reports, Smith said, make clear “how much we need pro-growth tax and economic policies that unleash our nation’s growth, increase wages, and create new jobs.” The budget bill “would do just that,” he said.
Neither Arrington nor Smith mentioned the leading threats to the programs coming from the White House. In Social Security’s case, that’s Trump’s immigration, taxation and tariff policies, which work directly against the program’s solvency. For Medicare, the major threat is a rise in healthcare costs.
But those have flattened out as a percentage of gross domestic product since 2010, when the enactment of the Affordable Care Act brought better access to medical care to millions of Americans.
That trend is jeopardized by Republican healthcare proposals, which encompass throwing millions of Americans off Medicaid. Policy proposals by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. such as discouraging vaccinations can only drive healthcare costs higher.
Let’s take a closer look. (The Social Security trustees are Kennedy, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and newly confirmed Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano, all of whom serve ex officio; two seats for public trustees are vacant. The Medicare trustees are the same, plus Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.)
The trust funds are built up from payroll taxes paid by workers and employers, along with interest paid on the treasury bonds the programs hold.
At the end of this year, the Medicare trust fund will hold about $245 billion, and the Social Security fund — actually two funds, consisting of reserves for the old-age and disability programs, but typically considered as one — more than $2.3 trillion.
Trump has consistently promised that he won’t touch Social Security and Medicare, but actions speak louder than words. “Trump’s tariffs and mass deportation program will accelerate the depletion of the trust fund,” Kathleen Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities observed after the release of the trustees’ reports this week. “The Trump administration’s actions are weakening the country’s economic outlook and Social Security’s financial footing.”
Immigration benefits the program in several ways. Because “benefits paid out today are funded from payroll taxes collected from today’s workers,” notes CBPP’s Kiran Rachamallu, “more workers paying into the system benefits the program’s finances.” In the U.S., he writes, “immigrants are more likely to be of working age and have higher rates of labor force participation, compared to U.S.-born individuals.”
The Social Security trustees’ fiscal projections are based on average net immigration of about 1.2 million people per year. Higher immigration will help build the trust fund balances, and immigration lower than that will “increase the funding shortfall.” All told, “the Trump administration’s plans to drastically cut immigration and increase deportations would significantly worsen Social Security’s financial outlook.”
A less uplifting aspect of immigration involves undocumented workers. To get jobs, they often submit false Social Security numbers to employers — so payroll taxes are deducted from their paychecks, but they’re unlikely ever to be able to collect benefits. In 2022, Rachamallu noted, undocumented workers paid about $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes.
Trump’s tariffs, meanwhile, could affect Social Security by generating inflation and slowing the economy. Higher inflation means larger annual cost-of-living increases on benefits, raising the program’s costs. If they provoke a recession, that would weigh further on Social Security’s fiscal condition.
Trump also has talked about eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits. But since at least half of those tax revenues flow directly into Social Security’s reserves, they would need to be replaced somehow. Trump has never stated where the substitute revenues could be found.
Major news organizations tend to focus on the depletion date of the trust funds without delving too deeply into their significance or, more important, their cause. It’s not unusual for otherwise responsible news organizations to parrot right-wing tropes about Social Security running out of money or “going broke” in the near future, which is untrue but can unnecessarily unnerve workers and retirees.
The question raised but largely unaddressed by the trustee reports is how to reduce the shortfall. The Republican answer generally involves cutting benefits, either by outright reductions or such options as raising the full retirement age, which is currently set between 66 and 67 for those born in 1952-1959 and 67 for everyone born in 1960 or later.
As I’ve reported, raising the retirement age is a benefit cut by another name. It’s also discriminatory, for average life expectancy is lower for some racial and ethnic groups than for others.
For all Americans, average life expectancy at age 65 has risen since the 1930s by about 6.6 years, to about 84 and a half. The increase has been about the same for white workers. But for Black people in general, the gain is just over five years, to an average of a bit over 83, and for Black men it’s less than four years and two months, to an average of about 81 and four months.
Life expectancy is also related to income: Better-paid workers have longer average lifespans than lower-income workers.
The other option, obviously, is to leave benefits alone but increase the programs’ revenues. This is almost invariably dismissed by the GOP, but its power is compelling.
The revenue shortfall experienced by Social Security is almost entirely the product of rising economic inequality in the U.S. At Social Security’s inception, the payroll tax was set at a rate that would cover about 92% of taxable wage earnings. Today, rising income among the rich has reduced that ratio to only about 82%. That could mean hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenues.
The payroll tax is highly regressive. Those earning up to $176,100 this year pay the full tax of 12.4% on wage earnings (half deducted directly from their paychecks and half paid by their employers).
Those earning more than that sum in wages pay nothing on the excess. To put it in perspective, the payroll tax bite on someone earning $500,000 in wages this year would pay not 12.4% in payroll tax (counting both halves of the levy), but about 4.4%.
Eliminating the cap on wages, according to the Social Security actuaries, would eliminate half to three-quarters of the expected shortfall in revenues over the next 75 years, depending on whether benefits were raised for the highest earners. Taxing investment income — the source of at least half the income collected by the wealthiest Americans — at the 12.4% level rather than leaving it entirely untaxed for Social Security would reduce the shortfall by an additional 38%. Combining these two options would eliminate the entire shortfall.
Social Security has already been hobbled by the Trump administration, Trump’s promises notwithstanding. Elon Musk’s DOGE vandals ran roughshod through the program, cutting staff and closing field offices, and generally instilling fears among workers and retirees that the program might not be around long enough to serve them. In moral terms, that’s a crime.
Those are the choices facing America: Cutting benefits is a dagger pointed directly at the neediest Americans. Social Security benefits account for 50% or more of the income nearly 42% of all beneficiaries, and 90% or more of the income of nearly 15% of beneficiaries.
The wealthiest Americans, on the other hand, have been coasting along without paying their fair share of the program. Could the equities be any clearer than that?
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
Dear Mr. Pelley:
I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.
Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.
Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.
Sincerely,
Nick Bilton
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes
The co-founder of Aspiration, Joseph Sanberg, was sentenced to 14 years in prison on Monday after defrauding investors and lenders of over $248 million.
The startup, an eco-friendly digital banking company boasting fossil fuel-free investments, carbon offsets for gas purchases, and a debit card with cash-back benefits for shopping at clean companies, was founded by Sanberg and Andrei Cherny. Cherny left the company in 2022 and has not been charged.
Sanberg, an Orange County native, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in October after being arrested in March last year. Aspiration subsequently filed for bankruptcy and liquidated all of its assets by July.
Sanberg and venture capitalist Ibrahim AlHusseini, who also faces charges, together forged a series of bank statements in order to obtain loans. From 2020 to 2021, the pair forged AlHusseini’s bank statements to show millions of dollars in assets in order to obtain millions of dollars from lenders.
Additionally, they forged a letter from their audit committee stating that $250 million in funds were available, when in reality Aspiration had less than $1 million. The amount of loans defrauded exceeded $248 million.
In 2021, Sanberg artificially inflated Aspiration’s 2021 revenue by $44 million by recruiting 27 fake customers to sign letters of intent pledging tens of thousands of dollars per month for tree planting services. Sanberg himself funded the contracts and used the inflated revenue numbers to obtain more loans.
The charges sparked an NBA investigation into salary cap allegations due to Aspiration’s connections with Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.
Ballmer personally invested $60 million in Aspiration, all of which was lost. He is now the target of a civil lawsuit alleging his participation in the scheme. Ballmer denies the allegations.
The team announced a $300-million sponsorship deal with Aspiration, and Clippers player Kawhi Leonard signed a four-year, $28-million marketing contract with the company, which reportedly performed no duties. The issue has raised concerns about how players are circumventing the NBA’s salary cap.
The team lost the $300-million sponsorship deal and an additional $20 million paid for carbon offset purchases.
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