Waiting on the Social Security Trustees Report: April 1 and Counting
When I was a newbie Social Security commenter and then blogger back in the 1999-2004 era there was a day I only half faceticiously called “The Bestest Day of the Year at Webb House!”. Yes it was Social Security Report Release Day which came out like literal clockwork on March 31st, so much so that I actually had posts at the Bruce Web set up with links that would go live the second the Report was released. Except that one year in the Bush Administration it didn’t and then in the six years of the Obama Administration when they missed each and every year. Always for good reasons, I guess because they never actually explain them, but really no harm no foul. Right? Well I would argue (later) that there is a harm and certainly a foul, because this isn’t just some sort of event that mostly just happens to come when it did. Instead this is a legally established mandate embedded right i the Social Security Act. Which language I reproduce along with some other pieces explaining the current makeup of the Trustees. With any bolding mine.
(c) With respect to the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund and the Federal Disability Insurance Trust Fund (hereinafter in this title called the “Trust Funds”) there is hereby created a body to be known as the Board of Trustees of the Trust Funds (hereinafter in this title called the “Board of Trustees”) which Board of Trustees shall be composed of the Commissioner of Social Security, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Labor, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, all ex officio, and of two members of the public (both of whom may not be from the same political party), who shall be nominated by the President for a term of four years and subject to confirmation by the Senate. A member of the Board of Trustees serving as a member of the public and nominated and confirmed to fill a vacancy occurring during a term shall be nominated and confirmed only for the remainder of such term. An individual nominated and confirmed as a member of the public may serve in such position after the expiration of such member’s term until the earlier of the time at which the member’s successor takes office or the time at which a report of the Board is first issued under paragraph (2) after the expiration of the member’s term. The Secretary of the Treasury shall be the Managing Trustee of the Board of Trustees (hereinafter in this title called the “Managing Trustee”). The Deputy Commissioner of Social Security shall serve as Secretary of the Board of Trustees. The Board of Trustees shall meet not less frequently than once each calendar year. It shall be the duty of the Board of Trustees to—
(1) Hold the Trust Funds;
(2)[11] Report to the Congress not later than the first day of April of each year on the operation and status of the Trust Funds during the preceding fiscal year and on their expected operation and status during the next ensuing five fiscal years;
(3) Report immediately to the Congress whenever the Board of Trustees is of the opinion that the amount of either of the Trust Funds is unduly small;
(4) Recommend improvements in administrative procedures and policies designed to effectuate the proper coordination of the old-age and survivors insurance and Federal-State unemployment compensation program; and
(5) Review the general policies followed in managing the Trust Funds, and recommend changes in such policies, including necessary changes in the provisions of the law which govern the way in which the Trust Funds are to be managed.
Now I am not saying that this clear violation of law on the part of the Trustees and by extension the President is some sort of ‘High Crime and Misdimeanor’. On the other hand you would think the minimum necessary would be SOME accouncement of the very fact of the delay and maybe some hint as to when the Report would be released. Instead current practice is just to have it come out when it comes out, as if this Report, which BTW is coincident with the Report of Medicare, is just some minor program like a Beef Advisory Board. Rather than a program whose costs amount to 5% of GDP (from Social Security alone).
When the Report does release you will be able to find it here: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/tr/ and of course summarized and excerpted at Angry Bear. Hopefully sometime before the statutory release date of the NEXT one. In the meantime I guess this can be treated as a Social Security Open Thread.
I wish they would issue the report on time, too. Maybe there are good reasons for it to be late (I know one year they blamed it on the effects of PPACA on the Medicare report). I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know about the Social Security Act. Is stating that something is a duty the same as requiring that it be done? Is not doing it breaking the law, or merely not doing your duty? They could always send a pro forma report to Congress with just the numbers required by the act, and then issue the full report later. At least the October numbers (which I am also interested in) are always released on time.
Bruce, would you and/or Dale care to speculate as to the reason(s) for these delays?
Little John I posed this question to a group of DC Heavy Hitters on SocSec a few weeks ago and the best answer I got back (from an insidery insider ) was ironically the same one Mike mentioned in regards to the first and second Report (effects of ACA on Medicare). But I don’t buy it, as least as First Cause, as Mike points out you can Report the numbers you do have which would include all 2013 Operations, and put asterices on the projections.
But as to a positive response I don’t have one. Clearly the Obama team has shown that Social Security is just not that important to them. Why? I cannot say. Though my darker paranoid side has guesses.
Hmmm. I think we must share that darker paranoid side!
Short version, and one that Dale and I have alluded to before.
The Social Security Report has two main sections, a 17 page Summary that is available as a separate publication and the 200+ page full Report which incorpates the Summary as Section A and then has additional mostly statistical sections B to F with accompaning Tables and Figures.
Now one way to look at this is that the Summary is simply a compressed and simplified version of the Reports by necessity. The other is to say that it is compressed, simplified and deliberately shaped by political design. In this somewhat paranoid view the main body of the Report is techncratic while the Summary is political, with the former being the more or less pure work product of the Office of the Chief Actuary and the latter the result of review of the former by the staff of the various Trustees, who as the excerpt from the Act shows clearly, are not disinterested parties that the name ‘Trustee’ would suggest but instead are half made up of current Administration Cabinet Secretaries. Plus the Commissioner, who can and has in the past had his own agenda (for example one of my heroes former long term Commissioner Robert Ball) and the Public Trustees who ALSO have their own agendas. For example current Republican Trustee Chuck Blahous was effectively Bush’s point man on Privatization while Democrat Reicschauer (sp) is a past CBO Director and known budget hawk of the Peterson variety.
You can read the Summary as such and just see it as carving out the difficult probabilistic stuff that goes into producing the three different projections at the heart of the Report: Low Cost, Intermediate Cost, and High Cost for the sake of simplicity. Or you can see it as an attempt to suppress the conversation about the validity of Intermediate Cost projections, which in the language of the Summary are presented without question or nuance. In the latter reading you would see a constant tension in the Reports from 1997 to around 2004 to suppress the news that the economy was consistently outpacing Intermediate Cost projections year over year and indeed was producing numbers right at Low Cost levels that project no shortfall at all. Moreover you could, or at least I did, see a disconnect in the numbers that produced Intermediate Cost (but which did not show up in the Summary) and those of what was then known as the Washington Consensus that held that the business cycle was broken forever and 3% GDP growth would continue forever. With the problem being that if you inserted Washington Consensus numbers for employment, productivity, Real Wage, and GDP into the models used by the Chief Actuary and Reported by the Trustees that Social Security would end up over funded. Which of course would have been good news to anyone not vested in the idea of ‘Crisis’. Which latter of course included the entire Clinton and Bush economic teams and to my emerging horror in 2007 to 2008 to the entire Hillary and Obama teams.
Now ‘luckily’ for the Crisismongers the 2007-2008 economic crisis shattered the Washington Consensus with the result that what had previously been ridiculously pessimistic Intermediate Cost projections suddenly became more realistic. Which you could read as either validation or a lifeline to ‘Crisis’ ‘Reformers’. But which doesn’t entirely explain away the gulf between the 1997-2005 sets of Intermediate Cost projections and the confident projection of the Washington Consensus for the entire rest of the neo-liberal project, especially but not limited to tax cuts. Whose underlying assumptions required substantial sustained growth in excess of then current Intermediate Cost numbers. Which numbers only appeared in the full Report and were simply subsumed into the Summary that was the clear sole source for all Social Security reporting in the MSM.
There is a lot more dark and paranoid side to be revealed, but this will give you an idea of the drift of the current.
Picked up here: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2014/06/14/the-2014-social-security-trustees-report-is-late-s/