flacaltenn
Diamond Member
Each year the trustees for the SSTF are required to publish a report to the President and the Congress on the financial condition of the SSTF. This year it came out last friday afternoon, and it ain't good. Excerpts:
The Social Security report finds that the "trust fund" will run out of money in just 17 years. The news only gets worse from there.
The program's unfunded liability over the next 75 years is now $12.5 trillion, which is up from $11.4 trillion last year and $4.7 trillion a decade ago. In other words, Social Security's long-term unfunded liability has increased by 166% in the span of 10 years.
And on a cash flow basis, Social Security is now losing money every year. Last year it was $54 billion in the red. In a decade the annual shortfall will reach $215 billion – after adjusting for inflation.
What it basically means is that unless the SSA program is changed, the checks that SSTF beneficiaries will get will be reduced significantly. If you add in the Disability Insurance (DI) into the mix you get the total OASDI program: (OAS - Old Age & Survivors)
The Trustees also project that annual cost for the OASDI program will exceed non-interest income throughout the projection period, and will exceed total income beginning in 2022 under the intermediate assumptions. The projected hypothetical combined OASI and DI Trust Fund asset reserves increase through 2021, begin to decline in 2022, and become depleted and unable to pay scheduled benefits in full on a timely basis in 2034. At the time of depletion of these combined reserves, continuing income to the combined trust funds would be sufficient to pay 77 percent of scheduled benefits.
The good news is that this problem can be averted. It's called "the Chilean Model," as 2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain put it, in what was his effort to get the voters to get serious about the issue.
The Chilean Model, the system of private savings accounts for retirement, is practiced in 30 countries. It was developed on a nationwide scale by José Piñera, the former labor minister of Chile during the 1970s, when the country was a socialist rubble and the coffers were bare, and it has worked every time it's been tried.
You really don't understand the basic economics of Social Security, do you?
Yeah, I kinda think I do. Maybe you should cut the crap and specify where I am wrong.
The report is repeating the fictions about SSA "being solvent". It's the Big Lie that hides the criminality of what was done with SSA overpayments for 30 years. Treasury wouldn't be booking debt now and ISSUING NEW DEBT to cover shortfalls -- if there was anything of value in the "trust fund"...
If we have to --- I'm prepared to make the case. But it's actually REAL SIMPLE. The SSA and CBO have been telling you this for YEARS.. Buried in the back pages of EVERY SSA report. Like this current one. Let me cut this short and just have you read and understand the perspectus and admission of guilt...
Federal Debt and Interest Costs
Gross debt, which comprises federal debt held by the public plus Treasury securities held by federal trust funds and other government accounts, is sometimes used to evaluate the government's overall fiscal situation. At the end of 2010, gross federal debt totaled $13.5 trillion--the $9.0 trillion in debt held by the public plus $4.5 trillion in debt held by government accounts. More than half of the latter amount is held by the Social Security trust funds. Because those trust funds and other government accounts are part of the federal government, transactions between them and the Treasury are intragovernmental; that is, the government securities in those funds are an asset to the individual programs but a liability to the rest of the government. The resources needed to redeem the government securities in the trust funds and other accounts in some future year must be generated from taxes, income from other government sources, or borrowing by the government in that year.
http://www.socialsecurity.gov/history/pdf/tr09summary.pdf
Social Security’s annual surpluses
of tax income over expenditures are expected to fall sharply this
year and to stay about constant in 2010 because of the economic recession,
and to rise only briefly before declining and turning to cash flow
deficits beginning in 2016 that grow as the baby-boom generation retires.
The combined difference grows each year, so that by 2016, net revenue
flows from the general fund would total $369 billion (1.8 percent of
GDP). The positive amounts that begin in 2016 for OASDI, and started in
2008 for HI, initially represent payments the Treasury must make to the
trust funds when assets are depleted to help pay benefits in years prior to
exhaustion of the funds. Neither the redemption of trust fund bonds, nor
interest paid on those bonds, provides any new net income to the Treasury,
which must finance redemptions and interest payments through
some combination of increased taxation, reductions in other government
spending, or additional borrowing from the public.
So for all of you believing the "SOLVENT" fairy tale. I ask you -- Which of the 3 choices given in BOLD LARGE above -- is currently being employed to "pay" the CURRENT deficit income of the SSA program?
Of course -- it's #3 -- additional borrowing from the public.. That's the SECOND time you were robbed for the same contribution to SSA...