by Bruce Webb (Well it seems a little slow around the Bear Cave today, sorry if this seems like deja vu all over again.) DI or Social Security Disability Insurance is maybe not in immediate crisis but it is not well. But then again it has been ailing for a long time and where the […]

by Bruce Webb (Update 4/13: several commenters pointed out that this claim is in fact wrong: “In this Report CBO has introduced a new term of art called ‘Primary Surplus’.” ‘Primary surplus’ is not a new term of art at all, it is instead one of five measures of ‘Budget Surplus/Deficit” as described in Table […]

by Bruce Webb (updated to add table) Click to enlarge. New poll: NCPSSM: Americans Support Protecting Social Security Benefits. Andrew Biggs links us to good news for those supporters of Social Security who oppose addressing the problem through benefit cuts. He comments on this and rightly points out that the poll is expressly limited to […]

by Bruce Webb Articles this week by Kevin Hassett and Lori Montgomery sought to make the claim that deficits scheduled for 2017 had been moved up to today as a reason to immediately convene a bi-partisan Commission to Reform Social Security (with ‘bi-partisan’ meaning dominated by Blue Dog Dems and Conservative Republicans). Well first of […]

I’m going to have to do a little clean-up work here (i.e., run the data in Excel instead of Stata), so I’ll ask forgiveness for the double-labels and all that.Graphic redone; data as per FRED. I think the story is clear. The long version is Bruce’s post below. What is now the top line is […]

by Bruce Webb As Krugman would say: Wonkish. Last Wednesday I put up a post Vanishing the Social Security Surplus which got some push back in comments by Andrew Biggs. So let me back up a little. Social Security surplus is defined in two ways. One is ‘Income less Interest – Cost’. The other is […]

by Bruce Webb Well the Republican Party and economic conservatives generally have made their position clear, they are openly using the current meltdown as an opportunity to kill Medicare and Social Security as they exist today. We saw this at the Stimulus Summit where the very first question by the Republicans, coming from Senate Minority […]

by Bruce Webb A new front was opened Monday in the war on Social Security. The first shot came from Kevin Hassett of AEI who wrote a piece for Bloomberg Recession Bites Into Social Security’s Surplus We have all been so busy whining about bonuses at American International Group Inc. and arguing about the so-called […]

by Bruce Webb What special holiday falls on March 31st? Yep is is Social Security Report Release Day. Now as I type it turns out that the Social Security Bunny (aka Commissioner Michael Astrue) has not actually delivered his special SS Egg, and gosh who knows, given that we are still in transition from the […]

by Bruce Webb Social Security is typically discussed in static terms, that is it ‘will’ or ‘is projected’ to get to this state or that at some fixed point in the future. This I think is an artifact of ‘crisis’ being seen as the result of a known fixed event, namely Boomer Retirement. And it […]