How Joe Biden Can Win on Social Security

In November, Democratic President Joe Biden is set to face Republican Donald Trump in an election rematch, as both candidates make a bid for a second term in the White House.

With the race already in full swing, the candidates have expressed their opposing views on key issues affecting everyday Americans—one of the most pertinent being Social Security.

The Social Security Administration is facing existential problems, as trust funds that pay benefits to tens of millions of Americans each year are scheduled to run dry by 2035, according to the latest trustees report from the government agency. While the year was postponed from 2034, providing some relief, the enormity of the problem persists. If action isn’t taken, benefits may be cut by a quarter for future retirees.

In the face of these problems, Biden and Trump have offered different remedies, which voters throughout the country are taking notice of. According to exclusive polling conducted for Newsweek by Redfield & Wilton Strategies on April 6, 48 percent of 4,000 respondents said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who ran on the promise of cutting Social Security entitlements. In the same poll, 36 percent said they trusted Trump with Social Security, while 41 percent said the same of Biden.

What Has Biden Promised?

In 2020, Biden released his four-point plan for Social Security ahead of that year’s election. His stance has remained the same, given that none of the proposed changes has taken place over the course of his administration:

• Revise the taxation of income earned above $400,000 by exempting wages between $160,200 and $400,000 from taxes. Currently, any wages exceeding $160,200 are not subject to taxation. In a White House statement released earlier this year, the president said he was “committed to extending Social Security solvency by asking the highest-income Americans to pay their fair share without cutting benefits or privatizing Social Security.”
• Change how cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) are calculated to no longer rely on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), switching to the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly (CPI-E).
• Boost the Primary Insurance Amount age that determines how much money is received in Social Security benefits.
• Raise the special minimum benefit for lifetime lower-wage workers to 125 percent of the federal poverty level.

How Can Biden Win 2024 on Social Security?

Experts have said Biden has the upper hand in the fight over Social Security given that he has a published plan in place, while Trump’s intentions for the program are more mysterious. Although Trump has made comments about cutting Social Security—which he later walked back—his Agenda47 plan outlines that not a “single penny” should be cut from Medicare or Social Security, while not proposing a plan to stop the looming crisis.

“Unlike Trump, Biden has a clear Social Security plan, which calls for shoring up the solvency of the program by raising the income threshold for payroll taxes,” Taylor Desloge, a visiting assistant professor of history at Connecticut College, told Newsweek. “It is a good start, closing about 70 percent of the shortfall.”

Desloge said Democrats should look to historical Social Security wins on the ballot if Biden wants to emulate that success in November: “In some ways, Democrats have been most successful when they have rallied behind the most popular features of the New Deal. Harry S. Truman’s come-from-behind victory in 1948 offers a good road map here.”

Truman campaigned on what would later be known as the Fair Deal, an updated version of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which sought to expand Social Security and add other protections for workers and retirees through a $4 billion tax raise. While boosting the tax burden isn’t often touted as a favored political policy, raising taxes on America’s wealthiest has become a popular point with the modern electorate.

According to the Pew Research Center, in 2023, 61 percent of Americans favored raising tax rates for households with an annual income of more than $400,000, including a quarter who said these tax rates should be raised a lot and 36 percent who believed they should be raised a little.

“As one journalist in the aftermath of the 1948 election remarked, Truman won because he appealed to the ‘New Middle Class’ that had grown up out of the New Deal,” Desloge continued. “The New Deal ensured that ‘to an appreciable portion of the electorate, Democrats had replaced the Republicans as the party of prosperity.'”

Desloge added that Biden could have his work cut out for him given that those often more reliant on government entitlements—the working class—were still trending toward Trump almost 10 years after the demographic realignment that helped him beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“I do think the issue of Social Security and entitlements can rebound to Biden’s benefit,” Desloge said. “Biden’s biggest problem now is convincing voters that can still be true in an era when upscale voters may be trending Democratic but the working-class base of the party is moving away. Few issues are more promising for Democrats in this regard than entitlements.”

What’s more, Biden’s plan to revise how COLA calculations are made would see more immediate positive changes to Social Security amounts. “The CPI-E regularly puts the spending inflation for seniors at two-tenths of a percentage point higher than the rate at which the CPI-W increases,” the Senior Citizens League has said. “That may seem like an insignificant amount, but over a twenty-five year retirement, COLAs do accumulate. We estimate that a senior who retired with average benefits in 1984 would have received $13,723.16 more through 2011 if the CPI-E had been used.”

“CPI-E better reflects the changes in prices that older adults face. The CPI-W is based on spending patterns by workers. By definition, Social Security recipients aren’t working—so that’s the disconnect,” Richard Johnson, a senior fellow at Urban Institute and the director of its program on retirement policy, told MarketWatch.

By changing the way COLA is calculated—something Trump has not proposed—Democrats could win over a sizable number of retirees who feel COLA increases are not enough to keep up with the rising cost of living. But Social Security campaigners and experts aren’t convinced that the hole—on COLA and other proposed changes—is being appropriately plugged.

“The only weakness that Democrats have on their Social Security policies is not enough people know that it’s them,” Alex Lawson, the executive director of Social Security Works, told Politico in November. “The way to get Republicans even more on the back foot about their plans to cut Social Security is to draw that incredibly clear distinction that Democrats want to expand, Republicans want to cut.”

Newsweek has contacted Biden’s campaign for comment via email.

What Happens Next?

Regardless of who wins in November, the solution to the Social Security crisis will be down to whomever is leading Congress at the time, said Justin Buchler, an associate professor of political science at Case Western Reserve University.

“Neither Biden nor Trump have any real plans. Biden is unlikely to reduce spending in any way, and what that does to the solvency of the fund would depend on the gimmick he selects for a short-term patch,” Buchler told Newsweek. “Trump has no plans, as such, and if you asked him what COLA is, he’d tell you something about Coke or Pepsi.”

“Neither could do anything without Congress anyway, and any plan that comes out of a Republican Congress would look different from a plan coming out of a Democratic Congress,” he continued. “No plan out of either would have any long-term fixes, but a Republican plan would be less generous to retirees at a lower cost, and a Democratic plan would be more generous to retirees at a higher cost. What you think is better is a matter of your ideological perspective.”