The conventional measure of the report is the exhaustion point of
the Trust Fund, which continues to be 2033. That is the point at which financial consequences start falling
on retirees. That date didn't change, but every other measure of the
crisis has changed for the worse.
The reasonable solvency of the system was reduced over the course
of 2013 from 19 years to 18 years. This reduction means that for the
first time in history on average someone retiring today at normal retirement
age expects to outlive full benefits. Anyone who is 48 years old or
younger roughly expects to retire after the system pays depleted
benefits. This, believe it or not, is the good news.
The bad news is that the size of the crisis arriving in 2033 is
growing rapidly. The report reveals that the unfunded
liabilities now exceed the Gross Domestic Product
of the entire county. The financing shortfall grew by $1.8 trillion.
The growth means that Social Security created more than $2 of broken promises
for every dollar that it collected ($855
Billion in 2013). The grand total of unfunded liabilities
exceeds all revenue ever collected by the system since its inception.
The other measure of the shortfall, the
75 year financing gap, tells us how much it will cost to
kick the can. This cost rose $1 trillion dollars, again more than the
system collected in all forms of revenue. To solve this part of the problem we
would have to raise payroll taxes from 15.3% to 18.18% (an increase of 2.88%).
In other words, the nation would need to divert roughly $10.6 trillion away
from deficit reduction in order to make the Boomer’s problem an even
larger problem for their children.
The report tells us that these broken promises will start falling
on people in roughly 19 years. The Trustees project that there is a 50%
chance that the system will pay full benefits
through 2032. It is reasonable today to expect that more than 50% of voting
aged Americans will retire after 2032. Five years ago, a near majority of
voting aged Americans expected to be completely unaffected by the
shortfall. Today, it is less than 20%.
Politicians assure us that we have time to fix the crisis.
It is ironic that Time is the one variable that we know with certainty is
destructive to Social Security. The 2014 report tells us that changing
the valuation date from 2012 to 2013 meant that the system created
$900 billion broken promises. Another way to
look at this problem is if we had diverted every penny spent on the military in
2013 to Social Security, the system would still have been worse off at the end
of the year than it was at the beginning.
What should trouble people is that the Congressional Budget Office
(“CBO”) provides similar projections on the Social Security system. Every angle of CBO’s
projections provides a more pessimistic forecast for Social Security. CBO
believes the crisis emerging in Social Security will be larger and arrive
sooner than the Trustees. They show that it will affect more people and
require greater resources to ameliorate. So it is possible that the
Trustees are too optimistic.
The problem with this coverage today is that it focuses on the
length of the fuse rather than the size of the bomb.
