The Way It Looks From Here: April 2012

Updated, 17 November, 2013.

Introduction and History

Myths are enduring stories. They usually illustrate a moral and often reinforce a belief. No culture is without them, no notable historic event lacks a patina of mythic embellishment. So it isn’t surprising that even the pedestrian saga of Social Security has a few.

The original Social Security myth was invented on purpose by Franklin Roosevelt. The President wanted people to believe that the money they were paying into Social Security was theirs, and that they would get it back one day when they were old, needy and deserving. He insisted on keeping an individual account for each person who paid into the system so that “ . . . no damn politician" could ever take it away. And they haven’t, though some have tried, as Roosevelt knew they would.

Of course it’s your money! Didn’t you get your own number when you enrolled? Didn’t your employer send your joint contributions to the Federal Treasury identified by your name and number? When you asked wouldn’t they tell you how much was in “your” account? Today you don’t even have to ask. Once a year until you retire they tell you. It must be your money you get back. Right?

The short answer to that last short question is: No! The size of your check at retirement depends on how much you earned – not on how much you paid in. (By design poorer people get relatively more of their paycheck replaced than the more affluent among us, although if you earned more than the guy at the next desk you always get more.)

If you don’t get your own money back, where does it come from? From your children's paychecks. Basically, the payroll taxes that workers pay today shows up in Social Security checks tomorrow. Advocates celebrate it as a modern "pact between the generations."

The idea is hardly new. In fact Social Security refines one of the ancient basic rhythms of family and communal life. Parents care for young children; grown children care for aging parents. The tribe steps in as it should when these caring traditions fall short.

Critics trash Social Security as a Ponzi scheme because to keep Social Security going depends on the rising prosperity of succeeding generations and on politicians who don't raise the size of our retirement checks beyond what our children can afford. In other words our retirement benefits depend on how hard and fruitfully we work and how well we raise our kids and choose our leaders. As will be explained, it also depends on our birth rate, productivity, life span and propensity to retire early.

Only twice in history have the payroll taxes piled up in Treasury accounts in significant surplus. The first time was when Social Security first started. Everybody who would be eligible down the road was still working -- and paying the new payroll tax. So folks then did what the prudent among us always do when spare cash piles up: they invested it..

Just how to invest that first surplus was the object of heated Congressional debate. Curiously, the reigning Democrats seriously considered buying corporate stocks, which were then rising, but still trading near their all time lows due to the 1930's Depression. Republicans were adamantly opposed, correctly fearing the Federal Government would come to own all public businesses. They labeled this fearful possibility “backdoor socialism.” (Today it is Republicans who work to get your stock broker involved.)

The feuding politicos compromised on a system little changed from then until now. By law any surplus is invested in a special form of interest bearing non-tradable U.S. Government treasury bonds invented for the purpose. These bonds, and the interest they earn comprise the Social Security Trust Fund. Like their fiscal cousins -- public treasury bonds that are sold and traded world wide -- Trust Fund bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States and are part of the total national debt.

This essay concentrates on the retirement portion of the Social Security system. Disability and survivor benefits are ignored (As is that elephant in the room, Medicare); however reforms that keep the retirement system solvent are healthy for them as well.

Managing And Updating The System

When we first started retiring under the new system, Social Security administrators began redeeming enough of our investment in the Trust Fund to cover our retirement checks. And so began the gentle monthly rain that nourishes millions of bank accounts to this day. Where did the treasury get the actual money to pay this rising obligation? From buyers worldwide of the other kinds of treasury bond. Thus the government exchanged, or rolled over, one kind of debt for another.

Note, however, that these transactions didn't change the government's total national debt. What did change, as the depression gave way to WW II and the post war world, was us. Twelve million mostly men returned home to make love, not war, and the first baby boomers were born. A contented, healthy, prosperous, fast growing population began living longer – and longer. A generous Congress kept adding benefits, including in 1975 an annual automatic cost of living adjustment (COLA).

First the boomers -- born between 1945 and 1964 -- flooded the schools and the colleges, then the job market. About then Social Security demographers took note: these guys one day were going to retire and live long and well. The smaller generations to follow would have dig deep to pay for their benefits Decades of mostly unheeded alarms ensued.

Finally in 1982 a commission was set up to identify how to cope with the coming tsunami of boomer retirees. Headed by Alan Greenspan, it recommended principally:

(1) gradually raising the full retirement age to 67 from 65;

(2) increasing payroll retirement taxes gradually from 10.7 to 12.4% (where it stands today);

(3) enlarging the covered workforce by adding federal workers (including Congress and its staff) and workers at tax exempt non-profit corporations among others;

(4) taxing benefits, now up to 85%, on a graduated scale;

(5) modifying somewhat the cost of living adjustment (COLA) formula that raises the cap on income subject to payroll taxes (now over $105 thousand) by linking it to the inflation rate.

Made law by a Republican president (Ronald Reagan) and a Democratic congress (Tip O'Neill et al), the Greenspan Commission's recommendations have enriched Social Security's Trust Fund by a net $2.4 trillion. Now, 30 years later, the boomers are retiring. As anticipated, not enough money is coming in from payroll taxes to entirely pay for their retirement. So the bonds held in trust for them are being redeemed as needed.

To redeem them the Treasury Department sells bonds to the public and puts the proceeds in our Social Security checks. Then it reduces the Trust Fund by the same amount. The process is no different than that followed when the first retiree got his first check. Now, as then, the total debt of the country is unchanged by this bit of routine accounting.

Still, unthinking critics loudly complain that Social Security is broke. That it has no "real money" because payroll taxes collected for Social Security were all spent by the Government on other things. That the "Trust" Fund is an empty hoax.

This is the second enduring myth of Social Security. To expose it as such takes some thought. Consider what the Treasury would have done if it had not had that $2.4 trillion in real money coming in over the years since 1982. Most years, because the government was spending more than it was taking in, and thus operating at a deficit, it would have had to borrow more from the public: corporations, investors, pension funds, banks, other countries. (For the last three years of the Clinton presidency, when the federal budget was in rare surplus, it would have not been able to pare back our public debt by as much as it did.)

If you are still one of those who believe that Washington stole your Social Security money, spent it on the usual boondoggles, and it won't be there for you when you need it, answer this question: where would you put $2.4 trillion for safe keeping? In "The Bank?" In Fort Knox amid the gold bars? Under the White House mattress? At least the Treasury pays 4.6% annual interest, even today. In the stock market? The government would own the Fortune Five Hundred and then some. Loan it to the likes of Greece?

Why not do what we have done from the beginning: pay our bills, borrow less from the public and keep track of what we owe Social Security?

The Larger Context

But, the critics say, suppose our public creditors won't lend us the money with which to redeem our promise to the retiring boomers. Especially when you consider the rate at which we are adding to our public debt to pay for all government programs and services. Social Security, while generally self supporting, is not entirely isolated from this much larger problem, which of course must be managed or our problems with Social Security will be minuscule in comparison..

There is no question that we face a growing debt fed by annual deficits as far as the eye can see. (Although, believe it or not, the annual deficit has been cut by more than half since Barack Obama became president.)There is no doubt that our debt is large when compared to past totals back to the beginning of the republic. Right now our creditors eagerly lend us more that we are paying back to them at historically low rates of interest, and we have no problem rolling over (replacing) our bonds as they come due or placing (selling) new ones. Our creditors certainly are not acting like they think we owe them too much. For now, anyhow.

The question to ask those who assert that our debt is too big is, "In comparison to what?" For the size of our economy determines what level of debt we can sustain, just as the size of a family's income determines how big a home mortgage it can handle.

Now, thanks to the Great Recession of 2007-9, the crucial ratio of Gross National Product (GNP) to total debt is worse than it has been since immediately after World War II. Since we successfully faced the cataclysmic conditions of that era we can at least have hope that today's debt problems can also be solved with the right stew of saving, taxing, inflating and investing, served cold to every American at the table.

Figuring how we ought to brew that economy saving meal is beyond the scope of this essay; however, putting Social Security on a solid basis is certainly part of that solution.

The Trust Fund -- Yesterday and Today

In 2010 Social Security expenditures exceeded contributions from workers and their employers. Retirees were paid normally, though, because $49 billion was redeemed from the Trust Fund. The Trust Fund itself continued to grow because interest on its assets, paid by the Treasury mostly from income taxes, exceeded that redemption.

The last time retirees got more money than the working generation paid in was 1983, the year the Greenspan group recommended all those revenue raising adjustments just discussed. Absent another such rescue plan, the Trust Fund will continue to grow from interest payments through 2022, and will have the money to pay its bills at the current rate until 2036 when the Trust Fund will be all gone. After that income from current workers and employers will support benefit payments of only 75% to current and future retirees.

Obviously, another rescue is needed. It will be politically unpopular. No doubt Congress will suck it up enough to appoint another Commission to hide behind.
Fixing Social Security -- The Variables.

Let's begin with a metaphor: the baby boom generation is like the lump in a newly fed boa constrictor. The lump moves slowly, but it does move. Setting aside this metaphor before it reaches its messy conclusion, we only need to further note that we are talking here about a one-time event. Falling birth rates -- and the reasons behind them -- preclude the possibility of another generation of boomer size. Put bluntly, and again metaphorically, this too shall pass.

Another great motivator behind the need for Social Security financial reform is also probably a one time event, albeit one that will unfold more slowly over a course that is harder to predict. That is increased longevity. A hundred sixty years ago, most people were dead before 40. When the first Social Security system was invented by Prussia's Otto Von Bismark in 1889, 65 was a ripe old age seldom reached and not exceeded for long. (In fact the Prussians first pegged retirement at 70, reducing it to 65 in 1916.)  That number persisted in 1935 when Bismark's scheme was adapted to our circumstances, although by then longevity averaged 60 years..

But in 2002 we lived an average 77.4 years. By 2010 the years of our lives had risen to 78.2. In 2011 we tacked on two more months. Most students of aging expect that longevity's rise eventually will taper and plateau, although that obviously hasn't happened yet. (Yea!) The oldest living modern human whose age has been carefully vetted lived to be 122. It follows from these uncertainties that the pact between the generations will require renegotiation about every generation until life extensions level off -- if ever.

(A technical note. Much of our increased average life span stems from much lower infant deaths. Longevity measured from age 21 has not increased nearly as spectacularly as life expectancy at birth. Further, the most relevant figure for Social Security actuaries is how long we live after we retire. For men life expectancy after 65 rose from 12.7 to 15.3 years in the half century from 1940 to 1990. For women, the rise was from 14.7 to 19.6.)

Another variable is the health of our economy. Social Security cannot be funded at promised levels without rising productivity and the wealth it creates. Further, if the fruits of rising productivity are not more widely distributed in pay packets than they have been lately, Social Security will not be adequately enriched.

So far, through ups and downs (including the "down" of today), the economy has continued to grow, even as we have left the farm, then the factory, for the service stations (counters, desks and computer terminals) of present day economic life. One comforting fact: a service economy is infinitely more expandable than economies based mostly on agriculture and/or industry inhabiting a finite planet.

Consider one final major factor before we get to the range of options we can tap to reform Social Security. Call it, awkwardly, the people's propensity to retire early. Retirement itself is a modern invention, as are such innovations as prolonged education, vacations, sabbaticals, unemployment compensation and paid sick leave -- all sanctioned ways of shirking working.

While the average age of retirement has barely budged in recent years, the retirement curve is steadily getting steeper. We are starting careers later and stopping them earlier.  Older workers when fired or laid off take what work they can get, and often are lured into ending their careers by part time retirement schemes, early buy-outs, the siren song of second careers and the growth of part time work. The young enter the permanent work force later, mostly due to the time it takes to get educated for the age of automation and algebra.

To summarize, keep in mind these variables: the birth rate; longevity; prooductivity, and retirement propensities as we explore the options open to us. Because our key variables are imperfectly predictable we will have to make adjustments every generation or so. It's been over 30 years since the last one, so we are due

Fixing Social Security -- The Options

To begin let's revisit the recommendations made in 1982 by Greenspan et al and judge how relevant they are for today.

1) Raise the retirement age. The case for continuing to raise the age of complete retirement is compelling. We live increasingly longer before the insults of age slow us down, while work itself grows on average less physically taxing. The relatively few physically difficult and dangerous occupations can be identified and treated separately.

Greenspan and company did more than raise the full benefit retirement age in stages from 65 to 67. They also increased the penalty for retiring at 62 from 20 to 30 per cent. Why not build on these twin moves and set a different formula for every year after the age of 55? Up to age 70 retirement would be considered early and subject to a falling rate of reduction in benefits. At 71 on up delayed retirement would accrue an additional benefit bonus. As before, these changes need not begin immediately and could be phased in.

There is historic precedent for age 70, starting with Bismark and the Prussians. Social Security's planners noted that state retirement schemes of that day used 70 as often as 65. Railroad workers could retire at 65 and that fact weighed heavily in the New Deal decision.

2) Adjust payroll tax rates. This straightforward option has endless appeal for those who hold the belief that everyone should be individually responsible for coping with the vicissitudes of old age. They need a gentle reminder that the base idea behind insurance is spreading the risk. We should adjust rates -- up or down -- as a final, not first, resort.

Perhaps a useful tweak would be to tie the payroll tax rate formally to the state of the economy. Even today's acrimonious politicians have agreed two years running to reduce payroll taxes during the current run of hard times. We could tie the timing and range of changes to the ups and downs of the GNP. That would turn a recurring political cat fight into a boring automatic counter cyclical policy. However, we might still need to adjust the base rate from time to time. When happier days are here again it might even go down!

3) Enlarge the covered workforce. We've pretty much been there, done that. The only large group still out of Social Security is about one fourth of the 23 million or so state and local public employees. States may elect coverage or not as they wish, but since 1982 the law keeps them in once they join.

Today's treatment of some government workers as a separate class is rooted in an historic concern that a federally mandated insurance and pension program for state and local government employees could not meet constitutional muster under the10th amendment. All federal employees hired since 1984 are covered, and it is argued by some that everyone should join, but universal coverage beyond today's high 90's participation rate is not key to how well Social Security will fare.

4) Taxing benefits. Retirees whose sole income is from Social Security don't make enough to pay any federal income tax. Fairly high thresholds insulate many more from this bite. If anything these thresholds should drop and exempt more. However, above some high income level it is fair to tax all retirement benefits. At nose bleed levels, where corporate and Wall Street "Masters of the Universe" dwell with Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and the Koch brothers, it makes sense not to pay a Social Security pension at all. Do this first. Most zillionaires wouldn't notice -- or bother to apply.

5) Raising the wage cap. This is a no-brainer. As a matter of simple fairness all wages, salaries and bonuses should be fair game. Raise the cap? No, remove the cap. Do this first, too.

A Further Option: Payback

While Social Security began in 1937, monthly payments to beneficiaries didn't begin until January 1, 1940. In the interim a system of lump sum payouts was instituted. One Ernest Ackerman received the first of these -- a check for the startling sum of $.17. We can only hope he lived long enough to cash a few monthly checks in 1940 and after.

The first recipient to do that was Ida May Fuller.  Her first check was for $22.54.  While working she had paid in a total of $24.75. Ida May lived to age 100 and amassed a lifetime benefits total of $22,888.22.

Ida May is not alone in making out like a bandit. Nearly all of us will be paid substantially more than we paid into the system even when Trust Fund interest is factored into the equation. Probably when she died her estate didn't amount to much. The Great Depression of the 1930's destroyed much of the wealth of older middle America. But the same is not true of my generation or of the Baby Boomers. We are leaving estates of unprecedented value. Our ability to preserve such wealth will have been based partly on the income in excess of our contributions we received from Social Security.

Why, then, should our estates not pay the excess back to the Trust Fund for the support of future beneficiaries. The obvious counter question is why go through the hassle of taking away a chunk of my kids inheritance in order to pay them back later when they retire? One answer to that argument is that all heirs are not equally deserving . Social Security at least pays recipients for their contribution to society as measured by their income earned over a life time, not by an accident of birth.

Another drawback is administrative. We wouldn't require that the family farm be sold or that the widow move to cheaper quarters so her home can be sold just to replenish Social Security. Liens on such property, to be exercised when sold, could be managed, but any such system would be awkward, highly unpopular in conservative and affluent circles and easily gamed in the manner that inheritance taxes are today.

A better way would be to buy insurance with part of the payroll tax money with the Social Security Trust Fund as the beneficiary if the dear departed was as lucky as Ida May. And if Social Security was ahead due to early death?  Then the beneficiary would be the deceased estate unless survivor's benefits were due. In that case both the beneficiary and the amount due would be calculated when survivor's benefits were terminated (after children mature and/or spouses die or remarry).

This proposal would add both revenue and costs to the system. Its implementation should be attempted only after a model of the system showed promise.
The Other Alternative: Private Accounts

Conservatives have pushed various ways to give individuals more control over how "their" Social Security contributions are invested on their behalf. These ideas are all based on the undeniable fact that other forms of investment -- usually equities -- accrue a higher return over time. A transition from today's "pact between the generations" to a system based on "individual responsibility" could be financed by a blend of taxing and borrowing, but the country and the Congress have always blinked at the one time price of raising enough to pay what is already owed current retirees so the next generation can put their money aside for their own use. That cat is hard to walk back.

Other countries, though, have done so. Nations as diverse as Chile, "socialist" Sweden and Margaret Thatcher's Great Britain have liberated their citizens, at least in part, to choose their own retirement investments. As with our 401k and other tax advantaged retirement plans, those swimming with the sharks of Wall Street and other Bourses have not always found the water fine. Investment risk, as we have recently learned anew, is difficult for even the experts to calculate and spread, even when their own money is at stake. Grandma on her own in these waters is fodder for the fish who would nibble her to death with transaction costs while handing her all the risks of market swings happening at the "wrong" time.

A Better Alternative: Government Equity Investments

Thanks to the invention of indexed mutual funds by Wall Street it is possible for large institutions to be in the market without taking effective control of individual companies. An arm of the Federal Government could be one such institution. To assuage conservative fears of "creeping socialism" limits could be placed on what percent of the Social Security Trust Fund could be so invested and what percent of the equities markets that investment could own.

Because the government would invest for the long term it could essentially ignore the gyrations of the markets. Steady periodic investments could reap the benefits of dollar cost averaging. Deliberate variations in investment levels could also act to stabilize the markets by selling when the bulls are running and buying when the bears aren't hibernating.

(Where this function should be placed within the Executive Branch is a relevant question. A few obvious candidates are the Social Security Administration, the Treasury Department, The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve. We should remove this function as far from political influence as possible short of amending the Constitution. Only the Federal Reserve is by law sufficiently independent of excessive meddling by Congress and the Executive. Greenspan's successors could then buy and sell to curb "irrational exuberance" and "apocalyptic dispair.")

A working example of how any federal agency might operate to invest a portion of the Social Security Trust Fund in equities is the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, an 80-person federal agency that manages 401k-like investments worth about $250 billion on behalf of 3.7 million federal retirees and active workers. The feds have already become a passive, and massive, player in the equities markets without socializing corporate America.

Social Security's Annual Raises -- Options For Reform

When Social Security first began it included provisions for annual adjustments to its base payment rates as average salaries and wages rose, thus giving retirees a stake in rising prosperity. However, Congress reserved the right to pass implementing legislation each year, and the objective formula was overshadowed amid legislative tinkering, tampering and pandering.

In 1975, when inflation was 8.0%, a cost of living adjustment (COLA) was enacted and put on automatic pilot absent other Congressional action (which has seldom occurred). The COLA is one calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from surveys largely of urban workers. It's applicability to old folks is in a word, laughable. We eat less, stay home more, get sick a lot more and eventually need other people's help just to live, to mention a few differences.

The BLS has developed an experimental COLA for the over 62 set which would increase the annual adjustment by 0.3%. Due to compounding, this adjustment bump is not the tiny sop it may seem, especially to those of us due to be among the very old. Enacting something like it seems only fair, although the money to pay for it must be found among the payroll tax adjustments previously described.

Unfortunately the Obama administration has gone the other way. To entice the GOP into a "balanced" approach to debt reduction, it has suggested adopting something called a "chained CPI (Consumer Price Index)" as the basis for COLA adjustments.   Because it assumes that when the price of filet jumps we make do with lesser cuts, it shaves a few tenths of a percent from what the COLA would have bee nunder the status quo. The logic is sound enough. Perhaps it could be incorporated into an elderly COLA.

Women and Social Security

In its beginning the "June Cleaver Concept" governed. The man provided at work, the woman and children abided at home, marriage was until death do us part and Social Security was structured accordingly. Much of the sexism inherent in the original law was washed out by the reforms of 1982-83. What remains is there indirectly from the facts of modern life.

Specifically, women earn less and live longer than men, raise the kids mostly alone and are the chief unpaid care givers of disabled and elderly family members, even when they themselves are old enough for Social Security. The only palliative in current law is a choice available to either sex: when one spouse dies the survivor may choose the higher benefit earned by either one of them. Married women, living longer, benefit more frequently from this provision.

But marriage is not a given. Divorce is much more common than 75 years ago, as is staying single. Divorced spouses do have a claim on the benefits of their exes, but that may be shared among other wives and ex-wives of our growing population of serial polygamists. Otherwise, divorce is an unequal opportunity financial disaster, more often impoverishing women and children long before they are eligible for Social Security.

Effectively compensating for these inequities by Social Security changes would be tricky and uncertain at best, and any help so provided would not kick in before the age of Social Security eligibility in any event. No proposals for how to do so -- if any -- currently have traction.

Illegal Aliens and Social Security

The most recently concocted myth about Social Security is that illegals are retiring on our dime. Somehow they are able to qualify for benefits without having ever contributed. Another form of the story has it that Congress is about to pass legislation permitting this raid on our retirement savings. In the lexicon of the Internet these views have gone viral. They're sick all right.

Fortunately they also are not true, as fact checking Internet sites endlessly and wearily tell all visitors. In truth, without the unrequited contributions of illegals the Social Security Trust Fund would be exhausted years earlier than is now projected.

Explaining why this is not only so, but why it will continue, requires a bit of historical detail, starting with a Reagan era law. In 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) made it unlawful for employers to knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Since only citizens with a birth certificate and legal immigrants with the right green card can get a valid Social Security card, farmers, construction firms and others looking for low skilled itinerant labor increasingly have been requiring a Social Security number from all new employees in order to comply with IRCA..

Illegals in turn have been buying fake documents on the street for about $200 a set.   Employers are not expected to be forensic criminal investigators. They can take the fakes at face value and hire with the tacit blessings of the law. Since 1986 employers of illegals have gradually stopped paying cash under the table and started paying with regular payroll checks, sending such deductibles as income taxes and payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare to the federal treasury.

At this point nearly everybody is happy. Illegals have work, employers get work done and various government pots are filled with honey money that can't be paid back to its illegal contributors.  We true, honest and legal Americans get cheap stuff when we buy the fruits of illegal labor and an estimated extra $7 billion a year in the Social Security trust fund is ours for when we retire.   This official rip off of the poorest and least welcome among us is only possible if they stay here and continue to work: think about it.

But why, you may ask, can't illegals apply to retire under Social Security and get away with it? Didn't they contribute? Didn't their employers send their (and their employer's) contribution to Washington? Didn't this money swell the Trust Fund? Answers to the last three of those questions is yes, yes and again yes.

Here's the rub. It's complicated, so pay attention to another bit of historical detail. Recall that, thanks to Franklin Roosevelt, everyone with a valid Social Security number (SSN) has a record on file of his earnings and contributions. As payroll records are received at the Social Security Administration's headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland, they are matched by SSN to an earnings record and then checked to see if the name matches as well. If there is a good match the earnings record is updated with data from the payroll record.

Not every match is good. Mismatches are kept in a 75 year old file called, not too surprisingly, the Earnings Suspense file (ESF). In the beginning transposed numbers, misspelled names, name changes and the like were the main reasons for mismatches. Giddy new brides attentive to other pursuits were the big problem. But these mismatches were manageable with letters and phone calls to employers.

Then came 1986 and IRCA. By 2004 an official report estimated that the ESF contained 250 million mismatched records. The money these records represent is worth as much as 10% of the value of the Trust Fund. How many of these mismatches are caused by fake or misappropriated SSNs used by illegals can never be known with pinpoint accuracy. The best estimate by Social Security's chief actuary is three fourths.

Whatever we do about illegal immigration will certainly affect, one way or another, the solvency of Social Security: think about it again.

Conclusion

Of the four major drains on the federal budget -- Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, Defense, National Debt Interest -- Social Security is the largest, the most solvent and the easiest to fix. Its current crisis can be met from a menu of sensible adjustments. Once over the twin humps of the baby boom cohort and the current, pleasant rise in longevity --which may take a couple of generations -- the system should find smoother, more predictable waters in which to navigate for another 40 years.

If it doesn't? If, for example, productivity doesn't keep pace with both a steady drop in fertility and a steadily growing life span, then we old folks and everyone else will find it necessary to work longer and/or live more simply. Even perhaps die more cheaply (perhaps the solution for Medicare that comes to pass first). Old age, they say, is not for sissies. And it is not, always and forever, better than the alternative.

The Way It Looks From Here

Saturday, April 7, 2012

GSA vs Las Vegas

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

On Social Security and Myth Making

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