[mgh95]

Social security is funded through payroll taxes on employees and emloyers. The "run out" is in the sense of the amount of money going out exceeds that coming in and the saved funds have been depleted. In this sense, it can "run out" that the savings are depleted and the plan is cash flow negative.

[wahern]

The narrative and word choices are deliberate. Republicans want to get rid of Social Security. So the narrative is Social Security is fundamentally broken, and it can be silently ended through passive negligence without having to take responsibility for ending a popular entitlement. No matter that it was created with the expectation that Congress would periodically adjust the retirement age to keep it solvent, and that it was always intended to provide only a bare minimum benefit, just enough to keep you out of the poor house. Poor houses were real, common things back then, and what the "free market" will result in.

Social Security revenue and expenditures can easily be balanced in theory. But neither party wants to do the right thing--Democrats want to expand entitlements, and increasing the retirement age as originally designed is the opposite of their goal.

[mgh95]

I don't quite understand what you mean the narrative here -- cash flow going negative is a fact. Attempts to discuss the COLA issues in 1970s-1980s [1] have failed. Attempts in the early aughts to divert funds by Bush Jr. [2] (long before I could even vote) were rejected in part because of skepticism stock returns would not perform well. And even today where we have additional tax breaks for seniors under the OBBA.

This has been a long running "heads we win tails you lose" with the older generations toying with the future dating back ~50+ years. Statements about "poor houses" don't mean very much when even uncapping the tax on wages for social security would only close ~61% of the gap [3]. Cuts are coming.

[1] See for example this hill (https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4258578-the-day-the-soci...) article discussing he issue [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/bushs-shaky-retirement-pl... [3] https://www.crfb.org/socialsecurityreformer/

[wahern]

In the 1984 Social Security was in the same situation it was today. To balance things Congress (among other lesser measures) set a new schedule for bumping the retirement age, the last step of which only took effect recently. It's not a coincidence. It's been over 40 years since then; it had been 49 years between then and the creation of Social Security.

The narrative is that Social Security is broken because previous generations were idiots who didn't understand or care that lifespans would increase, yet chose to create a fundamentally unsustainable entitlement program anyhow. But lifespans are right on track today as expected in 1984, just like lifespans in 1984 were exactly where actuarial tables predicted them to be in 1935. And Congress in 1984 expected their successors to do today what the 1935 Congress expected of them. A program isn't fundamentally broken just because periodic maintenance is required. OTOH, in theory the 1935 Congress could have attempted to implement a perpetually self-healing, self-executing algorithm, as could have the 1984 Congress. They didn't because politics doesn't work that way; kicking the can down the road to a future Congress is typical, though kicking it 40-50 years down the road is pretty laudable, all things considered.

Obamacare did try to create a self-executing process to reevaluate costs, and it failed miserably, because it required perennially revisiting contentious points of policy, and to do so outside Congress. The president had the responsibility, but no accountability, because failure would be blamed on Congress, and the Democrats especially. In that light, the approach taken wrt Social Security seems prudent.

[phil21]

> This has been a long running "heads we win tails you lose" with the older generations toying with the future dating back ~50+ years

Yep. I call it the old eating their young. Society cannot exist in such a condition for very long. They will collect full benefits while paying in relatively less, and die before it becomes their problem.

And while Social Security is the big one everyone talks about, there are a whole lot of state and municipal level public pensions that are exceedingly underfunded. These come due at pretty much the same time. The problem was the same with those - workers at the time did not want to pay more taxes but wanted to enjoy the benefits that those current pensioners provided them. They borrowed from the future generations to do it.