There is no Social Security Crisis [View all]

[jtown1123]

Great OpEd in USA Today:

Opposing view: 'There's no Social Security crisis'
By Max Richtman

The annual release of the Social Security Trustees Report is hands-down the least understood and most widely manipulated tool used in the campaign to cut Social Security under the guise of fiscal discipline. This "never let a crisis go to waste" strategy ignores many critical facts provided by the 2012 Trustees report, including:

•The trust fund solvency date for Social Security has seen fluctuations many times in recent decades, from a depletion date as distant as 2048 in the 1988 report to as soon as 2029 in the 1994 and 1997 reports. This year's report is well within that range.
•Social Security will be able to pay full benefits until the year 2033. After that, there will be sufficient revenue to pay about 75% of benefits.
•There is $2.7 trillion in the Social Security Trust Fund, which is $69 billion more than last year, and it will continue to grow until 2020.

There is no Social Security crisis. Contrary to the sky-is-falling prognosticators, we don't have to destroy Social Security to save it. We don't have to turn it over to Wall Street, raise the retirement age (which is a benefit cut for future generations), or adopt a cost-of-living adjustment that guarantees benefits won't keep up with inflation, leaving our oldest seniors vulnerable.
We do need to agree on a modest and manageable set of reforms to address Social Security's modest long-range funding gap. However, reforms touted as a "grand bargain" but designed to cut middle-class benefits in exchange for tax cuts is a "bargain" our nation cannot afford.

THE REST: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/story/2012-04-26/National-Committee-to-Preserve-Social-Security-Medicare/54561846/1?loc=interstitialskip

Also, a good blog post busting myths in the Trustees Reports: http://www.ncpssm.org/entitledtoknow/?p=2322