Social Security Headed Off The Cliff

Bill Smith, Editor:  The cartoon by A.F. Tony Branco showing Barack Obama pushing social security (grandma) over the cliff triggered a memory about a story by a fellow blogger  Steve Eggleston. He blogs at "No Runny Eggs." Steve is good at focusing on details though this may be an annoying thing for those with preconceived agendas based on desires, "dreams of their father," or prevarications.

In considering the cartoon, it would also be good to baseline the situation facing social security to a time before the present White House & Obama campaign rhetoric to a time when the White House mantra was just  "blame GW Bush." the below figures addressed by Eggleston were ignored by liberal media and others because they were focused on the "anointed one" who was going to solve everything. The time period was pre-obamacare, before a multitudes of new progressive expansionist programs and run-away spending, and when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was very happy expecting representatives of the people to vote on bills before they could know what was in them.

In 2009, Steve supported projections that Social Security would run in the red in 2010 and 2012. While Eggleston's  projection was not "good news" in 2009,  in 2012, we find that social security under the Obama agenda is at the edge of Cartoonist Branco's proverbial cliff. The program like other government spending is under-written by borrowing to fund the government  debt from of all places the "red menace," communist" China. Today's situation would have made Obama's former friend and alleged  mentor Frank Marshall Davis, a communist pornographer, extremely proud of Barack's make-over of America.

Before looking at that the following figures, recall that they were computed  before Obama's devastating programs and before the payroll-tax cuts. Payroll taxes fund social security.   If Mr. Obama is re-elected, its "game over" for social security and many other aspects of American life.

The 2009 gruesome figures on Social Security by Steve Eggleston:

Ed Morrissey obtained the summer 2009 Congressional Budget Office report on the health of the Social Security “Trust Fund”, and the news isn’t good. The same CBO that, last year under now-Obama budget director Peter Orszag, claimed that the combined OASDI trust fund would not begin to run a primary deficit (what Ed calls a cash deficit and what I’ve called an ex-interest deficit) until 2019, is now saying, at least to Congressmen, that it will run a primary deficit in 2010 and 2011, briefly run a cash surplus between 2012 and 2015, and return to what is presumably a permanent primary deficit in 2016.

I guess that is what the ranking member on the House Committee on Financial Services, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) was referring to when he told his hometown paper that Social Security would go into the red before 2012 if things didn’t improve dramatically. The 2010 primary deficit is also something predicted in the 80%-confidence curve of the stochastic model.

I do have a problem with the CBO’s numbers starting with 2012, when they claim that the OASDI primary surplus would begin its last run in the black. They assumed a 6.19% growth in revenues derived from the payroll tax in 2012, and a 5.69% growth in revenues in 2013. I decided to re-run the numbers using the still-high 4.59% growth in revenues called for in 2014 for those two years, and low-and-behold, the primary deficit never quite turns around:

On a related note, the Office of the Chief Actuary does not have the August 2009 “trust fund” performance available yet. However, the 12-month primary surplus [from the Bush years] between August 2008 (when the “trust fund” began running monthly primary deficits) and July 2009 is only $32.5 billion, with 8 of the 12 months having a primary deficit. . . . Full Article

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Tags: social security, off the cliff, Obama administration, Barack Obama, Steve Eggleston, AF Branco, political cartoon To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!