Well this is even less of an economics post than XV and in thinking on this the last couple days I realized I didn’t have a firm enough grip on the historical particulars to make it as definitive as I wanted. But still the concept is important and I could use some feedback so here […]
Properly speaking this is not an economics post. So most of it is below the fold. I started a Social Security blog in Nov. 2004 in the wake of Bush’s announcement that he would expend his new political capital on Social Security ‘reform’. At that point in time I had been looking at these numbers […]
I know I promised to back off the pace but yesterday’s comment thread got temporarily derailed before the point could be made. In yesterday’s post I highlighted the cash flow in and out of the General Fund to redeem the Trust Fund ‘Crisis’ at Shortfall in an effort to show that in inflation adjusted dollars […]
Social Security ‘crisis’ is normally discussed in terms of Trust Fund Depletion. But given that this event has been pushed back to at least 2041 and boils down to a benefit in real terms 25% better than the one my Mom gets today (78% of 160% = 125%), and that some awareness of this leaked […]
LMS is shorthand for the Liebman-MacGuineas-Samwick Non-Partisan Social Security Reform Plan one of any number of Social Security plans out there but noteable because of its authorship. Maya MacGuineas currently head of CRFB was previously ‘Social Security advisor to the McCain presidential campaign’, Jeffrey Liebman served on Bill Clinton’s Social Security team and is now […]
Reader Arne, a long time and well informed commenter submitted to Tuesday’s Social Security post a list of seven deceptively simple in form questions to get my take on them. Which I gave in comments. Unfortunately what HaloScan gives it can take away and a time this morning both his questions and my answers had […]
Or perhaps we could call this ‘Social Security basics as seen by Bruce’. In any event. Some recent e-mail exchanges and comments have led me to conclude that there are certain misconceptions about Social Security finance, misconceptions that both feed on and feed into certain pernicious myths initiated by people who oppose Social Security on […]
I have a horse race to watch so this will be short and in the form of a intellectual challenge. In any year that Social Security is in surplus, as it is now and is projected to be until 2017, cutting benefits actually increases total federal debt and so worsens the overall financial outlook going […]
The following is a reworked version of a piece originally put up immediately after the release of the 2006 Report in response to what seemed a very worrisome development. After a long series of years of continual improvement in Social Security long term outlook, suddenly progress stalled and actually reversed, the payroll gap went from […]
This figure shows in graphic form the outcomes of Intermediate Cost (II) vs High Cost (III) vs Low Cost (I) Outcome II shows the standard narrative. A Trust Fund Ratio rising to a peak in 2017 then a more or less rapid falloff to zero as the first the interest is tapped and then the […]