This paper investigates how increases in the level of maximum earnings subject to the Social Security payroll tax have affected Social Security benefits and taxes. The analysis uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to ask how different the present value of own benefits and taxes would be for the cohort born from 1948 to 1953 (ages 51 to 56 in 2004) if they faced the lower cap on the payroll tax that faced those born 12 and 24 years earlier, but otherwise had the same earnings stream and faced the same benefit formula. We find that for those in the Early Boomer cohort of the Health and Retirement Study, ages 51 to 56 in 2004, that after adjusting for nominal wage growth, benefits were increased by 1.5 percent by the increase in the ...