In the course of the two posts on Backwards Transfers (XXXVI & XXXVII) it became clear that even experts had a somewhat confused concept of the relation of past and future as it comes to Social Security finance. So this post will attempt to add some clarity. Social Security is by design a Pay/Go system […]

(Erroneously put up as XXXVII)Prior to 2004 Social Security Crisis was explained with a simple narrative: Boomers retire placing enormous strain on system, Trust Funds go bankrupt in short order, checks stop. Result? Social Security won’t be there for me. This storyline was always nonsense, as long as payroll tax is being collected benefits would […]

Soc Sec XXXVI: $17 Trillion Backward Transfer was a response to a comment by Jim Glass (scrivener.net) to a post by Andrew Biggs. Andrew responded with a new post attempting to rebut my argument. You can see the whole thing at Responding to Angry Bear: Where does $17 trillion come from including my response to […]

Time to knock this one down before it gets started. Over at Andrew Bigg’s blog he has a post up called Academy of Actuaries: Raise the Retirement Age. I am not particularly concerned with the text quoted which actually amounts to some AP guy’s take on an advance copy of what the Academy will actually […]

It is almost impossible to figure out whether Social Security is tracking better or worse than projected using productivity or Real GDP, for one thing the data lags and moreover is subject to revision. But there is one measure that can be tracked with precision: Trust Fund cash balances which are reported to the penny […]

Well open threads are good enough for Kos and Duncan and both Matt and Ezra have opened up Assignment Desk threads so I might as well jump on the bandwagon. I just got finished updating my index for this series at More Social Security Posts from Angry Bear and see that XXXIII was exactly a […]

I don’t claim to have studied Medicare in depth. They send me the Reports in the same envelope with the Social Security Reports and I browse through them, but that is pretty much it. So this post is more of a call for people more informed on aspects of Medicare to chip in. But I […]

I suspect few people know that the original Social Security Act set up not one but two retirement systems. Title 2 set up what we recognize as Social Security today, a worker funded retirement based on an insurance model. Title 1 set up something quite different. The history can be found on the SSA.gov website […]

Lets take a trip in Mr. Wizard’s Way Back Machine all the way to the year 2000. At that point we see Social Security geek Webb jumping in excitement (being one of the few people in history to get excited over Social Security financials). What is the source of this rather odd behavior? Well it […]

Well more than you might think. If you examine the economic and demographic assumptions that together generate the standard Intermediate Cost alternative of the Social Security Trustees you see a picture of a future America that is kind of bleak. I mean I lived through the period from 1968 to 1983 and economically it was […]