4 Key Lessons from Latest Social Security Trustees’ Report

By Charles Blahous on CNS News.com (June 11):

The Social Security trustees issued their annual report on the program’s financial condition earlier this year, along with their companion report on Medicare. As in previous years, these reports contain sobering news that lawmakers and the public need to know. The trustees who authored these reports are Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, and then-acting Social Security Commissioner Nancy Berryhill. Two other trustee positions, those of the independent, bipartisan public trustees, have remained vacant since Robert Reischauer and I last served in those capacities in 2015. This article summarizes four key lessons of the Social Security report.

#1: Social Security faces a huge financing shortfall. Social Security is designed to pay old-age, survivors and disability benefits from special trust funds financed by worker payroll tax contributions, interest earnings on those contributions, and (to a lesser extent) the taxation of benefits.

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#2: The shortfall is certain. For many years, those who felt an interest in delaying action to avert Social Security’s insolvency promoted a myth that much of the projected shortfall might go away by itself, depicting it as a byproduct of overly pessimistic assumptions.

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#3: We are running out of time to save Social Security, if we haven’t already. For years I have been asked how much more time we have to save Social Security. For years, I have replied that the window of opportunity is already closing, and that while one can’t know precisely when it closes altogether, it is closing fast. My updated and blunter appraisal is that it might be too late already. Clearly, it becomes too late well before Social Security’s trust funds run out.

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#4: We need public trustees. Since Robert Reischauer and I last served, the public trustee positions have remained vacant. This has deprived the trustees’ reports of critical bipartisan, independent oversight necessary to safeguard public confidence in the information they contain. Just as importantly, it has deprived lawmakers and the public of frank, bipartisan appraisals of Social Security’s financial realities, of the kind the public trustees had long provided, independent of the ex officio trustees who simultaneously serve in the president’s cabinet.  [read more]

Just as I thought—social security is going bust. The Millennials better start saving now for their future. Schools don’t teach saving (parents should stress this to their children too) because it makes people less dependent on Big Gov.