No new Social Security taxes - In a companion piece to my post below, Donald Luskin echoes why raising the FICA tax is a bad idea:

What's worse, a tax hike actually does very little to make Social Security sustainable. It just buys time. We'll just have to come back and raise taxes again at some point. The tax hike in the 1983 reform didn't create lasting solvency, did it? And we don't even need to raise taxes to rescue Social Security. We just have to wean ourselves from the wage-indexed benefit growth promised under current law. Benefits can grow at the rate of inflation without higher taxes -- but not at the rate of wage-gains.

My opposition to an increase in Social Security taxes is fundamental: at some point, Americans have to decide that the program is just not worth the money. When Social Security was started, the original tax rate was 2%; now it's 12.4% and 70% of American pay more in FICA taxes than in federal income taxes. It's time to say: enough.