At a candidate forum hosted by California Alliance for Retired Americans, the two contenders for California’s 11th Congressional District seat agreed: High earners should pay more into Social Security.
Dozens of retirees packed the Teamsters Local 2010 meeting hall in Oakland for the forum, tuning in as state Sen. Scott Wiener and San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, both Democrats seeking to succeed retiring House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, addressed the crowd via Zoom.
The California Alliance for Retired Americans, a nonprofit with more than 250 affiliated groups, has grown to represent over a million Californians. While the group has endorsed ballot measures, this November’s race marks the first time it will endorse a candidate for public office.
In his opening remarks, Wiener supported changing the payroll tax cap, or the maximum amount of annual earnings subject to the Social Security payroll tax, which is currently $184,500. ”If you make $10 million a year,” Wiener said, “you pay the exact same amount into Social Security as that person who makes $184,500 a year.”
Chan’s opening made no mention of Social Security but she spoke about pushing for progressive taxation broadly.
Once the candidates started taking questions, the San Francisco Public Press asked, “Would you support eliminating the Social Security payroll tax cap, so that income above $184,500 is taxed the same as income below it? If not, would you support raising it?”
Wiener reiterated his position on raising the cap, adding a proposal to also restart the tax at $400,000 or $500,000.
Chan agreed: “I’m absolutely in agreement of lifting that cap, because the system is not equitable. We need to make sure that people who can pay are paying their fair share into the system.”
She went further, arguing that lifting the payroll tax cap isn’t enough. She said she wants broader progressive taxation on the wealthy to fund other aspects of the social safety net. Wiener also talked about supporting stronger progressive taxation and the need to reverse President Trump’s corporate tax cuts.
The candidates otherwise differ on taxing the ultra-wealthy. Chan supports Proposition 40, California’s one-time tax on billionaires, and backed San Francisco’s “Overpaid CEO Tax,” which voters rejected in June. Wiener opposed both.
Bay Area per capita income runs about triple the national average and the median pay in the technology industry clears the $184,500 cap outright. A change in the payroll tax cap would certainly affect this district of high-income earners.
Issue crosses party, income and generational lines
Whoever goes on to represent San Francisco in the House of Representatives will inherit an age-old problem of how to balance Social Security’s math. The latest Social Security Board of Trustees report estimates that the Social Security trust funds – the accounts that hold the money paid out to the elderly, retired and those with disabilities – will run dry in 2034, at which point only 83% of scheduled benefits would be payable.
According to PensionBee’s 2026 Social Security Shortfall Index, one of these funds would run out by 2032, leading to a 22% cut in benefits, which would shrink a typical, $2,080 monthly check by $458.
The deadline has forced a brief and rare bipartisan reckoning on a topic that typically produces splits along party lines. In June, Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren published an opinion piece in the New York Times laying out their intent to write a bill to remove the payroll tax cap altogether.
Last year, Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who sides mostly with Democrats, proposed the Social Security Expansion Act, which would tax wages and investment income above $250,000. Separately, Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse proposed to set the threshold for Social Security taxes at $400,000 while closing a loophole that lets certain business owners avoid Medicare taxes. Both bills stalled in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Conservative experts do not agree that lifting the cap is the best fix. In response to Moreno and Warren’s opinion piece, the libertarian Tax Foundation said that uncapping the payroll tax without changing benefits would provide relief to the funds for just three years, with annual deficits resuming by 2030.
The conservative Manhattan Institute wrote in 2024 that raising taxes on high-income earners to fund Social Security would preempt using this “pot of potential tax-the-rich revenues” to fund other priorities, like Medicare, which faces its own impending deficit.
Andrew G. Biggs, an economist and senior fellow at the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute, told the San Francisco Public Press that lifting the payroll tax cap entirely would be historic. “Nobody has proposed a tax increase this large, probably since World War II.”
Biggs served in the George W. Bush administration as principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration. His diagnosis of the funding problem differs from Wiener’s and Chan’s, and lies instead with the way benefits are paid out.
He said eliminating the payroll tax cap is not the only way to protect low-income seniors. “Where does this massive tax increase actually go? It goes to higher benefits for middle- and high-income retirees.”
Meanwhile, he said, families earning $250,000 in San Francisco or Manhattan who are saving for a college tuition might still feel their monthly tax increase acutely.
But under the fluorescent lights of the Teamsters meeting room in Oakland, Dee Rosario is also doing the math for his family. His brother lives solely on Social Security and has no pension or savings after a stroke left him unable to work. His wife left her job to care for him. Rosario’s family relies on the Social Security check they receive each month and if it shrinks, the people he loves have nothing to fall back on.
Even Wiener’s plan to add an income bracket to the payroll tax doesn’t fully satisfy Rosario. “It’s good,” he said, “but I’d like to see it gone entirely.”
Pauline Brooks, CARA’s president, is 88, worked for more than 60 years and never had an employer-sponsored retirement plan. “I’m one of those folks whose life depends upon Social Security,” she said.
This shared reliance on these funds is why, after more than two decades of staying out of candidate campaigns, CARA members voted to change the organization’s rule and promise an endorsement in the congressional race this year.
For Brooks, it is an intergenerational issue. “We need to be in this fight to win for all of us – the seniors, our children and our children’s children.”
