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The headline machine was in overdrive earlier this year with the arrival of the latest Trustees' Report on SocialSecurity and Medicare. And while much of the media continues to herald the coming bankruptcy of Social Security, they do so at the risk of ignoring the real story -- a story that is neither difficult to explain nor hard to understand.
Technically speaking, an entity is deemed bankrupt when its obligations exceed its revenues. Therefore, if the projections are accurate, Social Security will, indeed, be deemed bankrupt in 25 years -- absent modifications to resolve the funding problems.
However, that does not mean that the money will be all gone come 2035. Nor do the headlines explain why we have the projected shortfall.

Subsequent to the projected expiration of the period where the trust can pay out 100% of the promised benefits, the fund will then be in a position to pay out 75% of promised benefits for the foreseeable future -- and that is not OK. Clearly, there need to be some changes made to Social Security so as to make up the 25% annual shortfall in benefits we anticipate will begin a quarter of a century from now.

The cause of the shortfall

But if we are to hope to make these adjustments in a sensible and realistic way, it might not be a terrible idea for the American public to actually understand the real causes of the shortfall in anticipated trust revenues.
We are consistently led to believe that it is the "aging workforce" that rests at the heart of Social Security' funding problems. Tune in to any of the media reports covering the numbers just out and this is what you are going to see and hear.
The claim, while legitimately representing a small piece of the problem, fails to explain the lion's share of the crisis we will experience in the Social Security Trust --and by lion's share, I mean a full 60% of the entitlement's funding shortages.
The "aging workforce" narrative serves to encourage and support the critics who claim that our problem is too many retirees lining up to collect their entitlements only to find that the government has failed to properly manage the Social Security Trust -- leaving the next generation of beneficiaries to be shortchanged 25 years down the line. As a result, the privatization pushers argue that Americans would be far better off looking out for their own retirement accounts so that government mismanagement will not come between hard-working citizens and their retirement money.
This is the Great American Social Security Lie.
It is a lie concocted by those seeking to fulfill Wall Street's eternal quest to get its sweaty palms on trillions of dollars of our retirement cash, allowing them to expand their casino operations beyond their wildest imaginations -- and Wall Street has a very healthy imagination.
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The best-laid plans
However, it is not as if we never saw the baby boomer generation coming or, somehow, forgot to plan for the eventualities.

At the time the boomer generation reached its end in the 1960s, it was clear that the huge birthrate experienced during the post-WWII era would put a strain on Social Security when these folks began to reach the age of retirement. Fortunately -- unlike today's Washington -- government in the early 1980s was actually capable of responding to a projected problem in a reasonable way.
And that is exactly what the 98th United States Congress did.
In 1983, acting on the research and recommendations prepared by the bipartisan Greenspan Commission, Congress enacted a number of modifications to the Social Security program designed to prepare the fund for the day that has now arrived -- the retirement of the baby boomers.
Those changes included raising both the tax rate and the age of retirement.
So, why the shortfalls after it was declared back in 1983 that Social Security was on firm and solvent footing for the foreseeable future? Was this just a miscalculation on Alan Greenspan's part or did something occur that he could not foresee?
It is true that there were some variables that could not be anticipated, such as people living a bit longer than expected. However, as it turns out, any mistaken projections in this regard are not what is causing the bulk of the projected shortfall in contributions to the Social Security Trust.
An unanticipated change

Greenspan's calculations were based on the presumption that income distribution in the United States would remain reasonable -- just as it had since America learned the lessons of how extraordinary disparities in income distribution lead to extraordinarily unfortunate economic events like the Great Depression.
How could Greenspan and his crew possibly have predicted that -- at the very time he was making his calculations regarding the future solvency of Social Security -- the nation was about to undergo a massive case of amnesia whereby the lessons of the Depression would be completely forgotten and greed at the top would return to, once again, trump sensible economic policy?
So, how does our record income inequality play into our Social Security problem?
According to Josh Bivens, acting Research & Policy Director at the Economic Policy Institute:
"Sixty percent of the current shortfall would be eliminated by a reversal of two adverse economic trends that have emerged since 1983: sluggish growth in average (real) wages and erosion of the tax base due to rapid growth in the inequality of earnings."
It's not particularly difficult to follow what Bivens is talking about.


Social Security is funded by the contributions you and your employer make by way of FICA taxes. When the Greenspan Commission recommended its modifications in 1983, the intention was that base from which earnings would be taxed would include 90% of the total income among the nation's wage earners. To insure that the Social Security taxes would not exceed the tax base intended, a cap was imposed so that once an earner reached the cap in a given year, that wage earner would no longer pay the Social Security tax on any earnings exceeding the cap.
The rate employees currently pay into Social Security is 6.2% on wages earned, up to a cap of $110,100 (reduced a bit for the years 2011 and 2012 due to the temporary tax holiday).
Thus, once a wage earner's income exceeds the $110,100 in a given year, that earner stops contributing to the Social Security fund. Therefore, it stands to reason that if more income is funneled up to those making more than $110,100, at the expense of those earning below the cap, less money is available to be paid into the Social Security fund.
That is precisely what has been happening.
The result of the nation's growing income disparity has altered the Greenspan expectation that 90% of income would stand as the tax base for Social Security contributions to our current circumstance whereby only 83% (or less) of income is being taxed for the Social Security fund as more money flows into the pockets of those earning more than the cap.
"Since the 1980s, the share of covered workers below the taxable earnings base has remained relatively stable at roughly 94%. However, the share of covered earnings that are taxed has fallen from 90% of all earnings in 1982 to 83% in 2007. The large declines in the late 1990s were mainly because salaries for top earners grew faster than the pay of workers below the cap."
What we see is yet another example of how the long-running stagnation in workers' wages has wrought real damage on even-unexpected elements of the American economy. It is not only a matter of workers having less money at their disposal to support our consumer-driven economy. We now see that stagnant wages have reduced the contribution levels going into the Social Security Trust as upper-level earners avoid the tax on a huge portion of their income.
I should point out that this result of crushing income inequality does not have the same effect on Medicare due to the fact that the tax we pay toward Medicare applies to all earnings with no caps. Thus, a dollar of income is being taxed for Medicare no matter whose pocket has possession of that dollar.
So, what do we do about this?

One would hope that at some point in our imaginary future, employers will recall the lessons of the past and see the folly of putting too much of the income into the bank accounts of only the top earners. But if that is not in the cards, and I doubt that it is, the time may have arrived to remove the caps on Social Security contributions in order to raise the tax base to the level that was intended.
The Congress of 1983 -- a Republican-controlled Senate and Democratic House -- would have understood this and made the necessary adjustments.
Can we expect the same from the 2013 version of Congress?
I don't know about you, but I do not plan on holding my breath.

 As we keep finding out our government has lost all concepts of control or the need for adjustments to the social security funding.  When LBJ removed the restriction on use of social security funds and moved them to the general fund it opened the door for mismanagement by our own government.  The results of the continued unwise adjustments being made clearly show the present governments lack of wisdom.  wp