IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fedreb/00058.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Can We Tax Social Security Benefits More Efficiently?

Author

Listed:
  • Helen Fessenden
  • John Bailey Jones

Abstract

Many seniors pay taxes on their Social Security benefits due to a provision in the program's 1983 reform, under which the portion of benefits that's taxable rises with total income. This tax structure can impose high marginal rates on seniors even if their other income sources are modest. These high marginal rates, in turn, can determine whether beneficiaries decide to keep working or retire. Research suggests that several policy alternatives are more likely to keep seniors in the workforce and to generate more revenue for the Social Security Trust Fund.

Suggested Citation

  • Helen Fessenden & John Bailey Jones, 2017. "Can We Tax Social Security Benefits More Efficiently?," Richmond Fed Economic Brief, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, issue November.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedreb:00058
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/economic_brief/2017/pdf/eb_17-11.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social Security;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedreb:00058. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christian Pascasio (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbrius.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.