“The body language has been different than it has been in the past.” Good heavens - the Social Security commissioner is hanging his hat on SS being fixed because of a hand gesture??? How about getting down to brass tacks, dealign with the facts without worrying about political ramifications, lay out some financial options and then implement them? What a joke.

It’s not a particularly difficult job to inject more solvency. Raise the early retirement age. When early retirement at 62 was put in, the full retirement age was 65. It is now 67 for those of us in middle age. Raise the early out age to three years earlier than full retirement age. Disability is a mess. It is based in large parts on age brackets. For instance, ages 50-54 are “closely approaching advanced age”, and 55-60 is “advanced age”. This may have been true in the late 1960s, but is not true now. By raising the ages on the age brackets, it will be harder for people to qualify for disability with the continued ability to perform work that involves sitting most of the day. Raise payroll taxes an extra 1% of earnings. Increase the amount of taxable income. Bingo, problem solved.

Yea, he sees solvency because he has a tax,tax, and more tax administration in office. Since when is ‘reform’ defined as raise taxes, reduce benefits. We better wake up quick, or the Bozo Obama is going to trash America for decades

Every year, the Trustees of the Social Security Trust Fund issue a report in which they make the 75 year projections that the article talks about.

What the article doesn’t mention is that they make three projections: one that uses pessimistic assumptions about the economy, population growth rates, etc; one that makes ‘average’ assumptions; and one that makes optimistic assumptions. In their most recent report, it was the ‘average’ assumption projection that had the Fund running out of money in 2041. In the pessimistic projection, the Fund runs out (if I remember correctly) in 2031. And in the optimistic projection, the Fund never runs out(!).

Now when I say that the Fund ‘runs out’, that doesn’t mean the end of Social Security; it just means that the Fund baby boomers have been paying into since the 1980s wasn’t quite big enough to cover the extra money the boomers would need (because there’s so many of us). Social Security recipients would continue receiving 70-some percent of what was otherwise due them.

The other thing to know is that the Trustees have been making these three projections (optimistic, average, pessimistic) for years and years now, so that we can look back at those reports to see which set of assumptions have come closest to reality. And guess what! It has been the optimistic assumptions - the ones under which the Fund NEVER RUNS OUT - that have been the most accurate.

We’re talking about soultions to a problem that most likely doesn’t exist.

I’ve been following Mr. Astrue’s career since he was at TKT. He’s got a great professional record and seems to me to have a lot of integrity and honor. If he believes that SS reform will occur than I tend to believe him.

tartan -

Think for a minute. Why do we need to raise taxes and reduce benefits? It’s because we’re trying to crawl out of the massive debt hole that Dubya dug for us. The trashing has already been done - now it’s time to pay the piper.

For the last eight years, government was spending like a teenager with Daddy’s credit card - except that they get to set their own credit limit. Now, times are tough, and we’re buried under a mountain of debt already. Some hard choices are going to have to be made.

I suppose you’d just have us continue inventing money out of thin air so that we can maintain benefit levels without raising taxes. After all, you’ll be dead soon, let your kids and grandkids worry about the bill, eh?

Mr. Astrue’s analysis is the “bean counter” approach to Social Security that conceals the fundamental economic reality that the program is a transfer of wealth from workers to retirees that operates essentially in real-time. Fundamentally, that means that the more retirees that are receiving benefits relative to the number of workers paying into the system, and the more that those retirees are paid in benefits, the greater the tax burden on those workers will be. That is true whether some Social Security tax receipts are being diverted into the general fund as is the case now, or whether some general tax revenues are diverted into the Social Security fund as will be the case in the future. (When the “Social Security Trust Fund” starts to be drawn down, transfers from the genral fund will making up the shortfall in Social Security tax receipts.)

People have a right to their own opinions as to how much (if any) the Social Security program should transfer from workers to retirees, but they would be able to express their opinions more intelligently if they recognized these basic financial/economic facts as to how the program works.