A BRIGHTER FUTURE FOR SOCIAL SECURITY….Via Brad Plumer, here’s a nice little chart from the 2005 Social Security report. It turns out that although the trustees have fiddled with the numbers to bring in the trust fund exhaustion date from 2042 to 2041 ? which makes for good headlines ? the long term outlook is actually better than it was last year.
Got that? In only a single year, the projected deficit in 2080 has gone down from 6.0% of taxable payroll to 5.75% of taxable payroll. Another few years of supposed doom and gloom like this and even George Bush won’t be able to pretend that Social Security is in crisis.
