Social Security Estimates Out To Lunch

This is from Agora Financial's 3/29/2010 5 Min Forecast.  These guys know how to tell it like it is.  Have you ever heard of an analysis like this in the mainstream media?  It takes 1 minute to read this which explains it in a nutshell.  How hard is it to do simple, explanatory reporting; obviously too hard for the mainstream media.


A-4 Driver


  The Congressional Budget Office now predicts the Social Security fund will pay out more than it earns starting this year -- as in it’s happening right now.
That’s just a shade off of last year’s forecast, which expected the fund to run a deficit starting in late 2016. And a far cry from the CBO data we used while making I.O.U.S.A. in 2007 and 2008.

And as you can see, the fund is not just dipping its toes in deficit waters. The current forecast reveals a torrential drop from $20 billion surplus to $29 billion shortfall since we premiered the film in Aug., 22, 2008 -- before we knew who the current president would be… and, more importantly, before Lehman Bros. crumbled.
Surely, some sort of unpredictable catastrophe precedes such a revision… something that wasn’t even on the national radar in 2009:
“The problem,” The New York Times helpfully suggests, “is that payments have risen more than expected during the downturn, because jobs disappeared and people applied for benefits sooner than they had planned. At the same time, the program’s revenue has fallen sharply, because there are fewer paychecks to tax.”
Really. Who could have seen that coming?