And total intragovernmental debt is $4.305 trillion. The current debt held by the public is $6.955 trillion.
Using the creative accounting used by Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and now Obama, the increase in intragovernmental debt each year didn’t count towards the budget deficit that they reported. So they were able to claim much smaller deficits than what they were truly running, all to have the bill fall on someone later, or to push off the responsibility of actually fixing anything.
And fixing these programs would have taken very small changes at one point...
In 1940, if you lived to age 65, you had a life expectancy of about 13.7 more years.
Today, that figure stands at about 17.38 years.
In the meantime, retirment age has gone from 65 to 66 for the population eligible for full benefits.
If you increased retirement age by 3 years so that you had approximately the same number of years of benefits in retirement as when the program started, then you would have solved 100% of the funding problem, according to the American Academy of Actuaries. And that’s with increasing the age to 70 steadily, finally hitting 70 in the year 2030 - not even an instant jump.
That’s a fair solution - gradual increases to minimize hits to those right at retirement age but not putting an enormous burden on future generations while only benefitting the elderly.
But that’s too easy, and no politician, Repub or Dem, has had the guts to actually solve SS... Bush’s “solution” didn’t close squat of the funding gap.
It is not a fair solution in any sense. My rate of return will be paltry as it is. Raising the retirement age will make the system an even worse deal.
Politically, raising the retirement age may be the only feasible solution. I am not convinced that gradually increasing the retirement age will solve the problem. I have not studied the math but the solution does not ring true to me.
A much better idea is to allow individuals to opt out in exchange for elimination of benefits. Slowing the growth of inflation is also important. Average wage indexing is crazy. No other pension has average wage indexing. The reason it is used for Social Security is to increase payroll taxes. The politicians like an easy way to raise taxes.
well go ahead....I have a difficult job in everyway and I can not work til 70...
not only that, but it makes a huge difference whether you get a nice defined pension from the govt or what is left of our industry...it is certainly another when you are going to get nothing at all except what you alone put aside.....
so you govt workers....feel free to not take SS at 62 or 66.....for many of us it will be the only defined money we will get, and we are TAKING IT!
“In 1940, if you lived to age 65, you had a life expectancy of about 13.7 more years.”
In 1940 the life expectancy for a white male was 60.8 years.
I’m not sure where those two pieces of information meet.