Social Security's Surplus Disappearing Fast in Downturn

[steven johnson]

We were told that 2017 was the year that the Social Security Trust Fund wouuld run out of money. Since the worse economic downturn since the Great Depression, that date has been moved up.

With unemployment rising, the payroll tax revenue that finances Social Security benefits for nearly 51 million retirees and other recipients is falling, according to a report from the Congressional Budget Office. As a result, the trust fund's annual surplus is forecast to all but vanish next year -- nearly a decade ahead of schedule -- and deprive the government of billions of dollars it had been counting on to help balance the nation's books. The Treasury Department has for decades borrowed money from the Social Security trust fund to finance government operations. If it is no longer able to do so, it could be forced to borrow an additional $700 billion over the next decade from China, Japan and other investors.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/30/AR2009033003291.html

If you count the $17 billion in income taxes expected to be paid on Social Security benefits, the system will still manage to provide a slight surplus for federal coffers in fiscal 2009. But from 2010 through 2012, there are small projected deficits, and after heading back into the black from 2013 to 2015, the program will then become a growing drain on federal finances, projects the CBO.


http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1890542,00.html

[msongs]

1. "Mission Accomplished" nt

[roamer65]

2. The dollars will be there for Social Security.

Freshly created dollars, in fact. Everyone will pay for them with the most insidious tax ever created...inflation.

[bluestateguy]

3. The earnings cap on FICA taxes has to be lifted

Right now it's something like $100,000. It's time we own up to this. After the election? Fine, but it will have to be done to insure SS's solvency.

[Hannah Bell]

4. The Washington Post missed the housing bubbles & bashes SS every chance it gets.

Their economic reportage is a joke, & a recession has minimal effect on the short or long-term solvency of SS.

[madrchsod]

5. oh no! obama is bankrupting social security!

shit i guess i`d better hurry up and die before social security money is spent.

oh well i guess i should have expected obama`s generation to throw us old people under




:rofl: