Roughly $3.8 trillion in wages above the taxable maximum escape the Social Security tax entirely — up to ~$475B a year in forgone revenue. Nothing paid, nothing owed.
Undocumented workers paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes in 2022 alone — plus $6.4B to Medicare — while barred from ever claiming the benefits. Everything paid, nothing owed back.
Move the levers
The asymmetry
Social Security’s funding problem is usually framed as demographic destiny: too few workers per retiree. That is real. But the framing hides a design choice. The program taxes 100% of a nurse’s wages and a shrinking fraction of a hedge fund manager’s — the share of national wages subject to the tax has fallen from 87% to about 83% as income concentrated above the cap. The exemption is not a law of nature. It is a line item.
At the other end, the system collects billions annually from workers who are legally barred from ever collecting. These are, in actuarial terms, the program’s best customers: pure contribution, zero liability. The 2026 Trustees Report names reduced immigration as one of the reasons the depletion date moved earlier. Mass deportation is not just a humanitarian question — it is a direct withdrawal from the trust fund, on the order of $26 billion a year plus the future contributions that never arrive.
Move both levers and the point becomes hard to unsee: the people being told the program can’t afford them are subsidizing it, and the people who could most easily fund it are exempt from doing so.
What the model shows — honestly
Removing the cap is not a permanent fix, and the model shows that. At full removal the program returns to surplus for several years, then structural deficits resume as costs grow — consistent with the Social Security actuaries’ finding that uncapping closes roughly two-thirds of the long-run shortfall. What it buys is decades of runway instead of a cliff in six years, and it does so without cutting a single check.
The model assumes above-cap earnings are taxed without earning additional benefit credit, which is where the higher revenue estimates live — and where the strongest objection lives too, since it breaks the contribution-to-benefit link the program was designed around. That link, however, is already broken in the other direction: the workers at the bottom of this ledger have no link at all. The equity-loan lever breaks it differently and deliberately — it routes revenue from the buy-borrow-die channel, wealth that currently touches no tax at all, into the one program whose funding gap is a scheduled event. It is the smallest lever in dollar terms, but it is the only one that taxes capital rather than labor to fund a program built on labor.