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Comment by anonym29 | Hacker News Reader

Social Security's current obligations are the largest single spending category of the entire U.S. Federal Government, and are continuing to grow rapidly.

The SS trust fund is projected to be depleted by 2033, at which point benefits will be automatically reduced to just 79% of their current level, by laws that are already on the books. This information is freely available from the Social Security Administration themselves. [1]

Keep in mind, Social Security's and Medicare's unfunded future liabilities grossly exceed the current liabilities of these programs.

These defined benefit programs are mathematically reliant on a growing, rather than shrinking population, yet a shrinking population is what the entire industrialized world is currently on track for with our sub-2.1 TFRs.

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/

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Social Security is going to end up being yet another one of those ladders that the Boomers pull up once they're done benefiting from it. Just like low home prices and cheap college tuition.

How do you figure that boomers, as a collective cohort, are uniquely responsible for the increases in college tuition and housing prices?

I'm not stating your assertion is false, but I don't see the connection.

Not the poster, but IMO it’s a bit like saying Gen Z is responsible for TikTok.

If they weren’t there, or this was 100 years earlier, or Gen Z was fundamentally different than they had been raised to be, then yeah TikTok likely would not exist, or at least not be a notable problem.

Post WW2 was an economic and population boom time. The boomers resulted from that boom, and the programs for them helped them, and that boom continued.

Booms continue to grow until the fundamentals fall apart and the leverage can’t keep it going anymore - and then you get a bust.

The longer and unhinged the boom, usually the longer and unhinged the bust.

And here we are.

Lawmakers do shenanigans with social security funding all the time, but it’s all moving money around and zero of it puts us at risk of defaulting on social security or related. The government will fund social security for as long as it exists in this current form, at 100% of expected pay out. I’m willing to bet significant money on this against naysayers, as I know that they aren’t just wrong but are aggressively wrong.

>The government will fund social security for as long as it exists in this current form, at 100% of expected pay out.

You are entitled to this belief, but I'd be remiss to not remind you that the Social Security Administration itself explicitly disagrees with your hypothesis, here:

"The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund will be able to pay 100 percent of total scheduled benefits until 2033, unchanged from last year's report. At that time, the fund's reserves will become depleted and continuing program income will be sufficient to pay 79 percent of scheduled benefits."

Source: Same link as the one in my original post, https://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/

Also from that link:

> Lawmakers have many options for changes that would reduce or eliminate the long-term financing shortfalls. Taking action sooner rather than later will allow consideration of a broader range of solutions and provide more time to phase in changes so that the public has adequate time to prepare.

Narrator: they did not resolve it sooner.

Do you need a growing population if the next generations increase their productivity instead? Then what do you actually need for “social security”? If it’s a house, there will be plenty of those left over when the population declines. Maybe we get to a point where people feel secure without government assistance and the program shrinks.

Correct, I realize my comment may have been ambiguous.

Money is now, and will continue to do more so in the immediate future, flow out from the gov’t/taxes/money printer, and into retirees pockets through SS and other means. Up until recently, it had gone from major inflows to mostly neutral on that front.

For the reasons you’re mentioning.

So yeah, either we need to start producing more economic activity - or more likely - just print more money and hope it all works out.

We’re not in as bad a crisis as Japan, but it’s the same kind of problem.

Interestingly, with the US as the worlds reserve currency this is going to have a global effect.

Another factor to keep in mind is that life expectancy has changed dramatically since the introduction of these programs, which is ultimately good if you're pro-humans-living.

When SS was formed in 1935, average life expectancy at birth was just 60, whereas the full retirement age was 65. In effect, this resulted in close to 150 people paying in for every 1 recipient.

These days, full retirement age is almost done being hiked to 67, while life expectancy at birth was up to 78 the last time I checked. This results in fewer than 3 people paying into the program for every 1 recipient.

If the full retirement age was simply indexed to (life expectancy at birth + 5), that would also solve the fiscal problems with Social Security, though it's a political impossibility.

I think people forget that the actual name of the "Social Security" program that people think of as "retirement" is OASI - Old Age Survivorship Insurance. I use Social Security in quotes because there are other components too, like DI - disability insurance, though that's negligible compared to OASI.

It was never meant be a retirement program, it was meant to be insurance in case you accidentally lived for a lot longer than you were expected to.

> When SS was formed in 1935, average life expectancy at birth was just 60, whereas the full retirement age was 65. In effect, this resulted in close to 150 people paying in for every 1 recipient.

Extraordinary claim (less than 1% lived beyond 65)! Any citations?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-...

Note that LEAB of 60 does not imply that fewer than 1% live beyond 65, nor does a payer:payee ratio above 100.

For most of human history, deaths followed a largely bimodal distribution - high infant mortality, lower morality in mid life, and then high mortality (approaching 100%) in old age. Put more simply: if you lived to, say, 3, you were much more likely than a newborn to make it to 70. A large enough portion didn't make it past infancy that it dragged down the entire average.

Much of the improvement in LEAB has been from improvements in infant mortality, not people living longer at the end of their lives (though that is increasingly a factor as medical care is improving).

Part of the discrepancy of the payer:payee ratio was due to more people having more kids, and a big part of that change is explained by our switch from a regular population distribution (many more young people than old people) to an inverted pyramid population distribution, like Japan's (a larger cohort of old people, increasingly smaller cohorts of younger people).

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