Social Security

Elizabeth Warren Wants To Raise Taxes and Give All the Money to Senior Citizens

Her plan to fix Social Security's fiscal flaws would ask workers to cover the full cost. Some Republicans are supporting it too.

Eric Boehm | 6.24.2026 3:40 PM

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Social Security doesn't have enough money to pay everything that has been promised, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has a plan to fix that: Making workers pay more in taxes without asking older Americans to give up any of their benefits.

Warren has been pushing this idea for a few months now, under the guise of defending Social Security against the Trump administration, which she claims is "threatening the benefits that millions of Americans have paid into their entire working lives." In reality, the threat to Social Security is the program's own math. When it reaches insolvency in 2032, the Social Security trustees project that all benefits will be cut by about 23 percent—that's the trajectory that will become reality if nothing is done.

In an op-ed published this week in The New York Times, Warren and Sen. Bernie Moreno (R–Ohio) lay out what they want to do: Eliminate the cap on the payroll tax. That sounds like a wonky idea, but it's pretty........

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