When it comes to Social Security reform, Democrats have traditionally been against benefit cuts and Republicans have been against tax increases. But one side of that balance is starting to shift. Over the past few months, several Republicans have come out in favor of payroll tax increases to bolster the program’s trust fund, including Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), and Rep. Lloyd K. Smucker (R-PA).
What is behind this sudden shift? The looming insolvency of the Social Security trust fund, which the Trustees now project for late 2032, is obviously a big factor. But Republicans could still call for benefit cuts, changes to the retirement age, or other adjustments.
So why aren’t they? I think the answer is in the data. (If you want to learn more about how Social Security benefits and taxes are calculated, be sure to check out this post.)
Who lives in Republican districts
To ensure the Social Security program remains solvent, policymakers have three options: cut benefits, increase taxes, or borrow money. Assuming policymakers don’t want to add $40 trillion to the existing publicly held debt, the only responsible choices are cutting benefits and increasing taxes. Between those two options, it makes complete political sense for Republicans to support tax increases given their constituency.
According to the Trustees, benefits would need to be cut by roughly 22% at insolvency. At the moment, Republicans hold the US House of Representatives by four seats. But when it comes to Social Security, incumbents and challengers care more about the distribution of Social Security beneficiaries in those congressional districts.
The chart below shows 432 districts (I omit the one independent seat, two vacant seats, and all non-voting members) by the share of the population currently receiving Social Security retirement, spousal, dependent, or survivor benefits (OASI benefits). (I don’t include disability benefits because those funds come out of a separate trust fund.)
Overall, you can see that more Republican districts have higher rates of OASI recipiency. In other words, Republicans represent more districts that have a greater share of people receiving benefits. (You can also explore the same difference in a map view at the bottom of this post.)
Among the 20 districts with the highest rates of OASI beneficiary receipt, only 3 are represented by a Democrat in the current Congress. Florida accounts for 6 of the high OASI receipt districts, all represented by Republicans.
The pattern holds even as you move further down the distribution, as the table below shows. In the top 25% of all districts—109 districts—78 are represented by Republicans and 31 by Democrats. Among the 217 districts at or above the median, Republicans hold 151 to the Democrats’ 66. You can pick your own cutoff in the first graph above to see the balance of districts between the two parties.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the share of people age 65 or older is also higher in Republican-led districts, as shown in the next graph. The distribution of Republican districts clearly sits to the right—that is, at older ages—of Democratic districts.
The direction reverses when looking at earnings. I use Census data on the share of people working full-time and earning more than $100,000 in each district as a proxy for the share of people who might be affected by an increase in the Social Security taxable maximum ($184,500).
Here, Democrat-led districts skew higher. There are 116 Democrat districts and 47 Republican districts where at least 25 percent of residents work full-time and earn more than $100,000 in 2024. With the Social Security taxable maximum at $184,500 in 2026, these estimates suggest that fewer people would be affected by a reform package that raises the taxable maximum in Republican districts than in Democrat districts (a change in the taxable payroll rate would affect all workers).
Who would actually pay
So Republican districts are older and their residents are more likely to be receiving benefits. They also tend to earn less than people in Democrat districts, so they are less likely to be affected by changes to the taxable maximum. So now we ask the key question: Who is affected most by lifting or adjusting the Social Security taxable maximum?
I’ll tell you this—it’s not the people receiving benefits, and it’s not the people earning less than the taxable maximum. It’s younger, higher-earning workers. If you follow the approach Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Moreno have proposed and increase or eliminate the Social Security taxable maximum, you don’t even increase taxes for most people and even less so in Republican districts. You only increase taxes for people earning above that taxable maximum cutoff, which, according to the Social Security Administration, is about 6 percent of covered workers.
It may be against traditional Republican orthodoxy to vouch for tax increases, but there is an interesting intersection of events here:
- a program that is widely popular,
- a program that needs a fiscal solution, and
- a situation where voters in Republican districts can benefit without paying more.
Only time, and the November election, will tell where the policy debate goes.
