Comments on: Trust Fund Exhaustion: A Moving Target

By: Bumpa

Bumpa — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:09:46 +0000

The Right, under Reagan and later Bush and B#%h, has put SS and medicare on a course that will eventually lead to their demise. Surpluses have been re-allocated to pay for fiscal follies and hair-brained schemes, then SS and medicare are blamed for the shortfalls in their budgets. Current thinking seems to go along with the directions past administrations have placed the country: that tax-cuts for the rich are set in stone, that we are a country that is in dire need to over defend itself against manufactured threats and needs a budget that reflects that paranoia. Therefore SS, Medicare/aide, education, the GI Bill, Food Stamps, the Post Office (and on and on and on) are wasteful and need to be cut back to preserve a blundering ideology that puts corporate greed above public good.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:57:06 +0000

I thought the whole point of trashing the economy was to make things like SS less sustainable. All part of the bipartisan project to turn the US into Mexico’s poor northern neighbor and China’s labor pool.

By: David

David — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 13:32:49 +0000

I think ANY attempt to extrapolate 20 years into the future (let alone 75) is a fantasy. These estimates are very sensitive to small changes in the input assumptions, and we generally can’t predict those well for a year, let alone 20. It is particularly difficult to predict changes in the amount and price of health care spending. I wonder how the hospital insurance trust fund would look if we could match the performance of the German health care system?

In practice, these are important and politically popular programs. I am sure that the policy makers of the future will find the money to keep them going.