The Washington Post article by Bogage and Weil, “Social security, Medicare finances looking grim,” does not fulfill the newspaper’s basic task of competently informing its readership. In the authors’ disingenuous effort to bolster the idea that we can’t afford Social Security, they leave out the most important detail – namely, the fact that we stop collecting payroll tax from people once they earn $168,000.

I think Mainers might like to know that if the wealthy paid payroll tax on their income like the rest of us do, we could fund or even expand Social Security benefits for the foreseeable future.

Andrew Brown
Bath