Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Simple. Look at the ratio of workers to beneficiaries.

That's it.

It's not just life expectancy at age 65 (extending) over time. It's also birth rate (declining) over time. It's also all cause mortality over time, meaning more people reach age 65 than used to.

It all means that there are fewer workers per retiree than in the past, which means that because SS is a pay-as-you-go program, the only way to make it financially sustainable is to raise taxes (BOOO!!!) or to reduce benefits (BOOO!!!).

I meant to add that to my list of reasons above.  Derpity-derp derp derp.  

Within that declining birth rate, there's also a higher % of the available population who is checking out of the workforce for one reason or another.  Which exacerbates your underlying point about the number of workers within the worker/beneficiary ratio.  

At least I've wondered about it.  I'm not bashing conservatives who voted for him, but I have always insisted he was in no way a fiscal conservative, not in his first term anyway. 

A couple things:

First, I think we (all of us generally) have a tendency to overstate the President's influence on spending.  I'm not saying that he has none but the lawsuits seeking to compel Trump to spend money that was appropriated by Congress illustrate that this simply isn't a decision that a President can make on his own.  

Second, I see so many political posts (from both sides) that run with this.  Democrats typically blame Reagan and Supply Side Economics to which my answer is that the HoR was controlled by Democrats for the entirety of Reagan's tenure and Constitutionally spending measures can ONLY originate in the HoR so to try to hold Reagan solely accountable for spending under his watch is disingenuous at best.  Additionally, debt as a percentage of GDP was a little over 30% when Reagan took office in 1981 and a little under 50% when he left office in 1989 and both of those are sustainable.  

Then I've seen similar claims from the left that "Clinton balanced the budget", well . . .  The debt was a little under 63% of GDP when Clinton was elected in Q4, 1992 and when he took office in Q1, 1993.  It continued it's gradual rise and peaked at 65.31% in Q2, 1995 THEN began a slow decline that bottomed out at just over 54% immediately prior to 9/11.  Giving Clinton 100% of the credit for debt reduction that didn't start until AFTER the Republicans took over congress in the 1994 election is again, disingenuous at best.  

Even after that, the debt "only" grew from just over 54% immediately prior to 9/11 to around 64% right before the 2008 credit bubble crash and recession.  It wasn't until then that the debt just got completely out of hand.  It spiked to over 73% in Bush's last quarter in office and over 77% in Obama's first.  By the end of 2010 it had risen to over 90% then Republicans won the 2010 mid-term elections but unlike 1994-2000 when we had a Democratic President and a Republican Congress, the Debt continued to rise.  By the last quarter of Obama's tenure (Q4, 2016) it was up to almost 105% of GDP.  

Getting to your comment about Trump here well, when he took over (Q1 2017) the debt was just under 103% of GDP and in the first quarter of 2020 (immediately prior to COVID) it had "only" grown to just under 107%.  That certainly isn't good but 1% annual growth isn't awful either, at least by comparison.  In Obama's tenure it grew by about 28% (77% to 105%) in eight years which is 3.5% per year.  Not that I'm blaming that entirely on Obama because I'm not.  He shouldn't get 100% blame for the increase any more than Clinton should get 100% credit for the decrease.  

As I see it, the problem is twofold:
First, every time some calamity comes along we spend a boatload of cash based on Keynesian principles to prop up the economy.  The two most recent are the 2008 crash and COVID in 2020:

• Debt as a percentage of GDP rose from ~64% of GDP in Q2, 2008 to ~88% of GDP two years later in Q2, 2010
• Debt as a percentage of GDP rose from ~107% of GDP in Q1, 2020 to ~120% of GDP two years later in Q1, 2022

Those two rapid increases cover the bulk of the increase since the debt was last what I would consider sustainable right before the credit bubble crash.  From then to now it grew from ~64% to ~122%, an increase of 58%.  24% of that was credit bubble and 13% was COVID.  Cumulatively that is 37%.  

The second problem is that Milton Keynes himself suggested that governmental expenditures rise in downturns to stimulate the economy and fall in booms.  The second half of that simply hasn't happened at all.  The debt shot up for the credit bubble but never got reduced once things got going again and continued to drift upward until COVID then shot up again.  Post-COVID it did drop from a high of ~133% but only to a low of ~116% and it has been drifting higher since then.  

Ok, but all of that was true (or at least similar) from the 1930's to the 1980's and back then Congress acted on it.  The raised the age (not enough to fix the problem but they did SOMETHING) in 1983 and, as I showed above, there were regular increases in the SS Tax rate all the way from the 1930's to 1990 but then . . . NOTHING. 

Why did Congresses and Presidents make changes to at least try to deal with the problem for decades then all of a sudden they just stopped. 

You're smart, MB. It's very simple. 

The value of the SSTF has been growing, EVERY year, from 1983 to 2020. Even including the dot com bubble bursting and the Great Recession. For every one of those years, Congress has been able to spend the SSTF surplus. Only since 2020 has that piggy bank been closed and suddenly started complaining it needs to be paid back. And so now it's a crisis because they can no longer raid the piggy bank. 

BTW back in the run-up to the 2000 election, there was a big debate over whether something should have been done. Remember the "Lock Box"?

You're smart, MB. It's very simple.

The value of the SSTF has been growing, EVERY year, from 1983 to 2020. Even including the dot com bubble bursting and the Great Recession. For every one of those years, Congress has been able to spend the SSTF surplus. Only since 2020 has that piggy bank been closed and suddenly started complaining it needs to be paid back. And so now it's a crisis because they can no longer raid the piggy bank.

BTW back in the run-up to the 2000 election, there was a big debate over whether something should have been done. Remember the "Lock Box"?

Ok, but the "Lock Box" was always a complete fiction.  The SSTF is in a "Lock Box", invested in Treasury Bills! 

You and I both know what that means:  The SS Surplus was blown spent wisely by successive Congresses and Administrations on buying votes and paying off lobbyists other Governmental functions and Congresses/Presidents/the Federal Government simply deposited IOU's into the SSTF "Lock Box". 

Functionally, the tax isn't high enough to sustain the benefits.  In Ohio the general (catchall for public employees not covered elsewhere) Public Sector Pension is OPERS.  The Rate for OPERS is 24% (14% employer, 10% employee).  That is for both Pension and what we accountants call OPEB which stands for Other Post Employment Benefit and means "retiree healthcare".  Thus, the comparison here would be to SS+Medicare or 15.3% not just SS at 12.4%. 

OPERS has an advantage vis-a-vis SS/Medicare because the healthcare for Ohio's Public Sector retirees is mostly covered by Medicare.  OPERS only provides:

• Bridge coverage, ie coverage from retirement to Medicare eligibility for those Public Sector employees able to retire before Medicare eligibility, and
• A Medicare supplement for Medicare-eligible retirees. 

Conversely, SS+Medicare have an advantage over OPERS because OPERS only collects on employees while they are public sector employees.  SS+Medicare collect on people from their first day flipping burgers at McDonalds at age 14 to their last day passing out Carts at WalMart at age 75 so it is a much wider net. 

My guess (and this is purely a guess because the information necessary to actually run the calculations simply isn't publicly available is that the SS+Medicare tax rate probably needs to be around 20% to keep the system afloat long-term.  Obviously you can also lower that "necessary rate" by either decreasing benefits or increasing the age of retirement or you can increase it by increasing benefits or decreasing the age. 

Actual video of the SS Lock Box.

https://youtu.be/2oIKaP3Hzes?si=vj2UKHaNxV6_LiSA

Okay, you missed what I was trying to convey... Stop focusing on the SSTF *or* the "lock box" for a moment. Let's just focus on this:

Functionally, the tax isn't high enough to sustain the benefits.

You asked why nobody was doing anything about the problem. And the reason nobody was doing anything about the problem is that the tax WAS high enough to pay the benefits all the way up until 2020. The program has only gone into deficit since 2021. 

The problem is that the demographics have flipped and the program is now in deficit, and that the deficit is projected to get bigger and bigger every year. So going forward (2021+), the tax isn't high enough to pay the benefit. 

But raising the tax at any time before 2020 would have done absolutely nothing of import. It would have made value of the SSTF grow faster, but that money was being spent elsewhere. Thus, it would have just meant that the payroll tax surplus would have subsidized the general fund to an even larger extent than it already was. 

Since the other thread kinda blew up, I thought it was best to resurrect this old one. 

Now split/merged, so we can continue that discussion [or not] in here. 

I don't want to derail your thread, but while we're kinda on the topic.....

I haven't heard much about cracking down on fraudulent Medicare claims.  That's a different animal than fraudulent benefits.  I'm talking about what legit doctors, clinics, and hospitals do....unnecessary testing, treatments, prescriptions, etc.  It's a huge, huge deal....a monumental waste.  There is technically a branch within Medicare whose job is to combat that, but as far as I can tell they're not very good at it. 

My wife insists that the amount of bogus crap that gets ordered and charged to Medicare simply because "they can" is enormous.  Doctors, imaging centers, clinics, etc. have ways of making money off everything that's done, and they have impure incentives to pad the appropriate treatments.  She left one clinic she worked for because the doctor who owned the place was so rampant with his needless Medicare charges that she feared for her license if anyone ever cracked down on the clinic while she was there.  (She may not be liable, but the investigation would be a stink on her license that nobody wants to go through.  That kind of thing can finish you, even if you're innocent.)  My job, in part, was to get insurance approvals for testing.  If you have, say, Blue Cross or Cigna insurance, or something, I had to submit documentation to those companies demonstrating the necessity of a test or procedure.  If a patient has Medicare, that stuff is all rubber-stamped.  No documentation, no questions, no nothing.  You can probably already see the problem there once you combine that with a financial incentive to push inappropriate things through.

Granted, there is a ditch on the other side of that road.  I have no love for insurance companies that have invented stupid and impossible hoops to jump through so they can deny more claims.  And I'm not saying that there are no reasons for why Medicare has wound up operating the way it operates.  But I am saying a crap-ton of fraudulent money is paid out to shady health care providers, on the taxpayer dime. 

Just from going with my mom, I can FEEL this effect.  Obviously she's in her late 70's now, with a host of medical issues that go along with old age.  AFIB and elevated blood pressure being #1, but nothing too serious.  I go with her to the Dr frequently.  What I've noticed is how often they want to just run her in, look at her for 5 minutes, and then schedule the next appt for like 30 days later or 90 days or whatever.  Now, for all I know, all of this is just very necessary and protocol, but that's not how it feels.  I've often asked if we can just follow-up with telehealth or something similar because they're not really checking much, mostly just BP and asking questions.  May not seem like a big deal but most of her doctors are in the medical center in Houston, it takes about an hour to drive there, pay to park, and about an hour back. It can eat up the whole day quick.