by Bruce WebbWhat does it take? A stake through the heart? A bullet through the brain? Baker and Krugman do some pushback.Dean Baker in his post The Post’s Jihad against Social Security points to this article Obama Predicts Years of Deficits over $1 trillion and notes that they don’t hesitate to single out the usual […]

How is Social Security holding up given the terrible employment numbers? Well not as bad as I had feared. OAS::Opening balance//Projected year end balance-Intermediate Cost//Y-O-Y Increase//Year end balance-Low Cost//Y-O-Y increase-Low Cost$2.023 trillion // $2.216 trillion //$193 billion// $2.221 trillion// $198 billion DI::Opening balance//Projected year end balance-Intermediate Cost//Y-O-Y Increase//Year end balance-Low Cost//Y-O-Y increase-Low Cost$214.9 billion//$218.7 billion//$3.8 […]

by Bruce Webb 2008 Financial Report of the United States Government (Report) provides the President, Congress, and the American people a comprehensive view of the Federal Government’s finances, i.e., its financial position and condition, its revenues and costs, assets and liabilities, and other obligations and commitments. The Report also discusses important financial issues and significant […]

Projecting the long-term health of Social Security is of necessity subject to uncertainty, the known unknowns if you will. But you can if you like sample the short term health by consulting Treasury’s Monthly Trust Fund Reports which gives balances to the penny with a one month lag, and compare them to the various projections […]

What fresh hell is THIS?When I first started studying Social Security in detail sometime late in 1997 I made what to me was kind of an amazing discovery. Social Security ‘crisis’ then and now tended to be perceived and discussed within the deterministic frame of Boomer Retirement, kind of a ‘demography makes destiny’ thing. Every […]

By Bruce Webb PGL raises and answers this question over at Econospeak Health Care Debate: So This is Why Conservatives Hate Social Security. Or rather he allows Conservatives in the person of Michael Cannon at Cato admit the fundamental truth: successful government social programs fatally undercut future political success for the Right. Cannon: Blocking Obama’s […]

Near the end of each month the Treasury Dept releases Trust Fund Reports giving balances to the penny for the previous month. By comparing these balances to the projection in the Annual Reports we can get a rough idea of how Social Security is doing year to date. This year’s Report was released on October […]

By Bruce Andrew Biggs directs our attention to a new detailed PRA plan by Mark Warshawsky, a member of the Social Security Advisory Board: Notes on SS Reform: Actuaries Score New Reform Proposal The post does not link to the plan itself but instead to a detailed scoring of it by the Office of the […]

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 […]

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 […]