What if Social Security fix raises payroll taxes, denting US labor supply?
Congress patches OASI by lifting payroll taxes and the wage cap, shoring up the trust fund but adding a wedge on labor income that mildly drags growth and consumption.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Congress patches OASI by lifting payroll taxes and the wage cap, shoring up the trust fund but adding a wedge on labor income that mildly drags growth and consumption. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Consumer spending ▼ · Global growth ▼ · Recession signal ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.