Publisher of @NCThirdAge Twitter and Facebook for news for seniors in NC; @rchady.bsky.social; lifelong learner; traveler; advocate for the common good.
"Eleven years. That’s all that’s left until the combined Social Security accounts — the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund and the Disability Insurance Trust Fund — are likely to run out of money and can no longer pay full scheduled benefits, according to the latest report of the Social Security trustees. "I don’t worry too much that the checks won’t go out after the projected 2035 exhaustion of the funds, which though legally separate are often regarded as a single pool of money. Current beneficiaries wouldn’t stand for it, and neither would their children. (Even with no fix at all — highly unlikely — incoming payroll taxes would cover 83 percent of scheduled benefits.) "I support benefit cuts, although not for everyone. Lower-income Americans should be spared. If anything, their benefits need to go up. People 55 and older should also be spared, since they’re either retired or close to it, so they can’t offset any reductions by working and saving more. "But upper-income Americans of working age are going to have to get used to the idea that Social Security will be less generous than they expected. They will need to stuff more money into their 401(k)s and maybe delay their retirement by a few years. "Biggs is actually optimistic. He argued in a recent essay for The Wall Street Journal that a vast majority of retirees are doing OK and it wouldn’t be expensive to put a safety net under those who aren’t. A Census Bureau report that drew on data about pension plans and other records found that the share of older people in poverty fell to 6.9 percent in 2012 from 9.7 percent in 1990, lower than the official poverty figures. "Only 3 percent of respondents who were 65 to 74 between 2019 and 2022 said they were “finding it difficult to get by,” and an additional 12 percent said they were “just getting by,” according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decision Making. The problem is concentrated, naturally, among those with the least savings. Among people of that age with less than $10,000 in savings, 12 percent said it was difficult to get by, and 30 percent said they were just getting by, Biggs calculated."