There's literally no analysis that shows social security completely failing at any point. That's spin you're getting from partisan media, and it's absolutely infuriating the people allow this to persist.

In a few years, given no changes, the cash flow will go negative and we'll begin spending down the trust fund. By 2035 or so (I forget the numbers, and the projections tend to vary widely anyway because of differing models and, yeah, partisan spin) the trust fund will be spent and the social security administration will need to adjust, as it will be taking in something like 80% of obligations.

A 20% shortfall is a big accounting problem. It's hardly "plan for it not to exist".

The trust fund is an accounting fiction that doesn't hold any economically productive assets. Congress spent social security's surplus in the general budget and issued special obligation bonds in return that accumulate "interest" on paper but do not ever collect from the government. They cannot be sold on the market. Taxes or debt needs to be raised or benefits need to be cut effectively now.

This is from a 1999 OMB report:

``These [trust fund] balances are available to finance future benefit payments and other trust fund expenditures–but only in a bookkeeping sense. These funds are not set up to be pension funds, like the funds of private pension plans. They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury, that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures.``

Oh sorry, I'll clarify... My concern is not that it will become untenable and money will run out - my concern is that it will be slashed into the ground as part of an "entitlement cut" - it's actually pretty unlikely given the party of cutting things that people like gets a lot of votes from the social security crowd, but there is only so much more than can slice off Medicaid before they start looking elsewhere.

" Social Security to not exist when you get old,"

that's totally self defeating. There are simple adjustments that can be done to make it viable long term. But there are quite few people in DC who desperately want it to fail to show that government is no good.

Social Security is so popular that either party trying to cut benefits will be voted out at the next election, especially if the other party runs on restoring it. So instead of cutting benefits to those currently receiving it, instead there will be a call to increase the retirement age. This is already happening in Denmark where the retirement age will be 67 by 2022 and after 2030 could be increased 1 year every 5 years.

Raising the retirement age is probably the only way to keep things going. People used to retire in their 60s and died in their 70s. Now they live up to 90 and more. Simple math tells us that this is not sustainable.

If we got rid of the income cap on the tax it would make an enormous difference.

Let alone the idea of income over a certain amount having to pay a larger percent...

> . But there are quite few people in DC who desperately want it to fail to show that government is no good.

And there are quite a few others that want to expand it to cost even more, so they refuse anything beside perfection to achieve meaningful compromise.

Social Security is just sending checks worth 3 or 4 percent of GDP to old people. It’s about the same as defense spending. Nobody ever worries about running out of money for defense.

Social Security spending is >2x the military budget, making up one third(!!!) of the US federal spending every year [1]. It's also a system that is inherently growing in terms of payouts and shrinking in terms of pay-ins [2]. This might not be a big deal if it was just a normal tax, but the idea behind Social Security is that your Social Security tax contributions pay off the current payouts. So if the system continued to exist as it is now, the amount paid into the system would have to grow significantly to ever pay out this generation's Social Security and the pattern would likely worsen over time.

[1] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud... [2] https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/1...

As someone that started paying into SS a few years ago this sounds more like a cynical self-fulfilling prophecy more than anything else.

You're paying into SS but that money is not being set aside for you, it's being used for current retirees. The next generation will have to pay into SS for you and betting that SS will not change it's payout conditions till then, in the midst of mounting debt liabilities and potentially shrinking contributions, is quite optimistic.

I'm not sure why you've been downvoted. Your statement has both facts and opinion, and forwards the conversation.

Personally, I agree with your opinion. I think that we're going to get to the point where SS is taking in less than it pays out and, combined with the large amount of individuals who don't like anyone getting government money and so push to get rid of it, the system is going to fall apart.

The worst part is that it's not even the government's money. People pay into the SS and take back out later. It's supposed to work like a savings account, to some extent.

Just to clarify, your payments aren't being specifically earmarked for you (this isn't a government run retirement plan) they are being pooled and that pool is being used to pay for current and future SS beneficiaries, but the pool isn't going to run out anytime soon. It's more likely that it will be diverted for political reasons and defunded - to speak precisely the "entitlements" you paid for will be taken away without recompense.

The SS trust fund is currently about $3 trillion. While the money you pay in isn’t specifically set aside for your own use (the whole point of the program is to pool everyone together), it’s not like a Ponzi scheme where contributions from people paying in are directly used to make payments to beneficiaries.

The SS trust fund is an accounting fiction. The vast majority of it is held as treasury securities and the cash has long since been spent. Thus the federal government has offsetting liabilities for all of those assets. Once SS starts spending more than it takes in, the feds will have to raise capital to cover the shortfall, same as if the trust fund did not exist.

Sorry, this comment missed a big point - the money wasn't spent on Social Security, the money has been borrowed by other agencies and expenditures that owe it back.

That's like saying "Oh man, your job isn't paying you enough money, you should quit." 'But I make 80k, that's plenty!' "Oh, you uh did, until I stole all but five dollars." 'Oh darn, guess I'll quit then.'

I'm well aware that the money was dumped into the general fund and spent on other things. That doesn't change the fact that the money is gone, so saying that the trust fund has $3 trillion doesn't really help with SS's fiscal viability.

If the US government was instead a group of private corporations then the balance for SS would be positive due to the assets they have in the form of debts, just because there isn't cold hard cash there doesn't mean the money doesn't exist - the only way to get to that point is to consider the other parts of the government as bad borrowers and assume the debt will need to be written off.

If a private company holds treasury securities, we don’t call that a fiction. What’s the difference?

It's different because the private company didn't issue the securities itself. The equivalent for a private company would be creating $3 trillion in bonds, "selling" the bonds to itself, then claiming to have $3 trillion.

In this analogy, they’d be different departments or subsidiaries with different balance sheets, so there’s no need for the scare quotes: they really are selling the bonds. And they didn’t issue $3 trillion in bonds, they issued $20 trillion and sold most of them to other parties on the same terms.

At the very least it indicates that the company prioritizes the finances of that one department much more than any other.

The other problem I have with this complaint is that it implies that things would be different if it didn’t hold treasuries. If it had $3 trillion in a bank account, would that make it “real”? The US government issues dollars too, and can devalue the currency at will, so it’s not really better.

Ultimately, it’s a commitment mechanism. If SS were paid out of the general fund, it could be cut off to fund other projects at will, as long as Congress were willing to piss off old folks. (Which is already a big obstacle, admittedly.) By funding benefits from a gigantic trust fund holding government debt, cutting off SS to fund something else would require imploding the world economy.

I definitely place myself on the liberal side of politics and will support social security for people before and after myself, but the current generation of older folks definitely appear to be trying to pull that ladder up behind them.