Social Security Defender Shared Files
Who or what is ‘Social Security Defender’? Well it is basically a G-mail account controlled by me: socsec.defender@gmail.com . Which is kind of pretentious and vainglorious on my part but does allow a platform for some attached products including the blog Social Security Defender and a Google Drive. In which as an experiment I have created a Public Folder called Social Security Defender Shared Files into which I plan to save any number of official SSA and CBO Reports and tables and figures extracted from them. So if this works you should be able to Bookmark/Favorite the link and have a one stop location for lots of Social Security resources.
As of this moment the folder includes a PDF of the 2014 Report, folders containing TIFFs and PNGs of the various Figures from that Report, plus maybe a copy of my 2014 SocSec Report Tables Workbook which might or might not open for you in Excel or be able to be saved to your own Google Drive to open in whatever. I have been wanting and planning to ramp up Social Security Defender into an integrated product supporting the blog, a Google+ site, and file sharing for about four years but given that the enemies of Social Security had simply gone on hiatus recently put the project on the back burner. Well THEY’RE BACK!!! and attacking via the Disability program. So here we go.
Feedback and advice can be left in comments or sent to the g-mail address. Thanks.
More files added including CBO Reports and Dec 2014 Trust Fund Reports
Well, they’re back. But they never left. And they have a new trick. Which puts them one step ahead of the good guys.
Fortunately, perhaps, they left open a window of opportunity. They say they would accept a “tax increase” as a fix.
We should take them up on that. It would cost a dollar sixty per week to fix DI for the next seventy five years. That’s a one time only increase in the payroll tax for DI.
A few years ago when I suggested raising the DI tax to fix the then “short term actuarial insolvency” the cost would have been forty cents per week in each of three years (2010,2011, 2012) and one more forty cent raise in about 2045.
The difference is the cost of waiting. The DI Trust Fund, before it was depleted would have provided enough interest to make up the difference between an essentially 1.20 per week fix and the now needed 1.60 per week fix.
Obviously not a big deal.
Given that no one on the Democrat side has any ideas at all, maybe we could just pay for it. Pennies per week. Just in case we might need it some day?
Please do not confuse this one time only, dollar sixty, fix for DI with the plan for fixing OASDI … retirement AND disability included… by raising the tax eighty cents per week each year over about twenty years (while wages are rising eight dollars per week per year) to pay for the increased cost of retirement (you are going to live longer and want a higher benefit to keep up with the higher standard of living people will expect by the time you retire.
That eight cents per week includes the cost of fixing DI, but that would involve transferring some funds from the OASI trust fund to DI, which our enlightened Congress has decided is no fair to the poor old people they want to protect by cutting their pensions.
Including their private pensions, if you have been keeping up.
You could structure the 80 cent per week OASDI plan in a way that required no transfers from OAS to DI in the short term. It would be nearly as simple as devoting all the increase to DI for three years and then rebalancing.
But the important point is that DI is easily fixed. And has been known to be broken by official numbers since 2005. Instead Bush launched us on the Privatization Train which by its very nature would have done bubkis for DI. It was all bait and switch, particularly since back then practically the entirety of the 25 year gap was due to DI anyway.
Webb
you are exactly correct. the first two years of the whole SS fix could be dedicated to DI. I wasn’t thinking of that because actually the first year that the one tenth of one percent tax would be needed to avoid short term actuarial insolvency (the combined Trust Fund will fall below one hundred percent of a year’s costs in ten years] would not occur until 2018 by my last calculation. not enough difference to make a difference.
the privatization was of course what the bad guys have always wanted: the government to force the workers to invest their money in the rich guys schemes. that’s their idea of freeing us from the shackles of big government. now they propose to accomplish the same thing by cutting SS benefits below the amount needed for an indoor retirement… forcing you to invest in “the market” to have any chance of retirement at all. the operative word here is “chance.”
Now now, Bruce, everybody knows that you are the “Social Security Defender” par extraordinaire! π