IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/epo/papers/2013-02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Raising the Social Security Payroll Tax Cap: How Many Workers Would Pay More?

Author

Listed:
  • Nicole Woo
  • John Schmitt
  • Janelle Jones

Abstract

On January 1, the maximum amount of annual earnings subject to the Social Security tax – a.k.a. the payroll tax cap – increased to $113,700. Every year, this cap is adjusted to keep up with inflation. Many Americans are not aware that income above the cap is not taxed by Social Security. In other words, workers who make $113,700 or less per year pay a higher Social Security payroll tax rate than those who make more. To help alleviate Social Security’s long-term budget shortfall, raising – or even eliminating – the cap has gotten some attention from policy makers. This paper finds that just 1 in 20 workers -- the wealthiest -- would be affected if the cap were eliminated entirely, and only 1 in 75 would be affected if the cap were applied to earnings over $250,000. In addition, the share of workers who would pay more varies greatly according to gender, race, state and age.

Suggested Citation

  • Nicole Woo & John Schmitt & Janelle Jones, 2013. "Raising the Social Security Payroll Tax Cap: How Many Workers Would Pay More?," CEPR Reports and Issue Briefs 2013-02, Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
  • Handle: RePEc:epo:papers:2013-02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/ss-2013-01.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    CPI; social security; social security cap; inequality; payroll tax cap;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H - Public Economics
    • H5 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies
    • H55 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Social Security and Public Pensions
    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
    • H3 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:epo:papers:2013-02. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ceprdus.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.