Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Bruce Webb on Social Security: The Collection

In honor of Bruce Webb’s “hibernation” post (and reinvigoration of his own blog), a partial retrospective of his 50-part series (for which some enterprising publisher should contract for a book version): Intergenerational Equity, Unfunded Liability and Selfish Boomers Unfunded Liability Bookended Social Security 2027: A date for action? CBO: Updated Long-Term Projections for Social Security […]

R.I.P. Social Security Crisis: "We hardly knew ya"

Time for this adopted Angry Bear to go into hibernation for the winter. Events out of Alaska and now out of Wall Street make it extremely unlikely that Social Security itself will return to the center of the policy table anytime soon. Rather than rallying to crush one of the remaining cornerstone’s of the New […]

Intergenerational Equity, Unfunded Liability and Selfish Boomers

The newest buzzphrase in the Social Security world is ‘Intergenerational Equity’. It is indeed the theme of the new movie IOUSA (to whose webpage I link) which itself is pretty much a documentary of the Concord Coaltion’s Fiscal Wake Up Tour. (The fact that Concord was founded by Pete Peterson and rights to distribute the […]

Unfunded Liability Bookended

In the last installment of this Social Security series we kind of dug into some of the details of unfunded liability, what it was and what it wasn’t and most importantly where the incidence occured: in the past or in the future. Backwards Transfer is Back. In the course of that I think it became […]

Backwards Transfer is Back: Social Security’s Unfunded Liability

Awhile back we had a series of posts about the causality of Social Security’s ‘unfunded liability’ in response to a comment by Jim Glass over at Andrew Bigg’s. The first post was XXXVI: $17 Trillion Backwards Transfer. Andrew answered back with Responding to Angry Bear: Where does the $17 trillion deficit come from? to which […]

Social Security 2027: A date for action?

I spend a good deal of time talking about ‘Nothing’ as a plan for Social Security. You can make an excellent numeric case for ‘Nothing’ in the short run VIII: Calculating the Cost of Inactivity and you can make a reasonable economic case for ‘Nothing’ in the long run II: The Shape of Low Cost. […]

CBO: Updated Long-Term Projections for Social Security

Updated Long-Term Projections for Social Security Andrew Biggs in Treatment of uncertainty in new CBO Social Security projections directs our attention to the new release from the Congressional Budget Office. I don’t tend to focus on CBO projections precisely because they are more optimistic than the Trustees’, I don’t want to open the door to […]

Soc Sec XLIV: ‘We can’t grow our way out of this’

In reviewing some of the final comments on XLI: Why not assume Low Cost the following partial comment caught my eye: “We are not going to grow our way out of this. And it’s highly unlikely that we will tax our way out, either.” To which I would want to ask: “Who says? And can […]

Soc Sec XLIII: Solvency: Demographics or Productivity?

I don’t want to pile on but I did think the new actuarial note was important enough to justify the XLII post. I want here to front a discussion from the comments on XLI: Why not assume Low Cost? where I think people are talking past each other. There seems to be some confusion between […]

Soc Sec XLII: Unfunded Obligation and Transition Cost

In a really timely fashion the Office of the Chief Actuary released their Actuarial Note 2008.1 with the above title last month. It is well worth the read for anyone wanting to cut through the conceptual tangle raised in the recent posts on ‘Unfunded Liabilities’ and ‘Backwards transfers’. In addition it provides us with some […]