New report from the Social Security Trustees

Earlier this month, the Social Security & Medicare Trustees released their 2022 reports. You can view the source reports here and here.

Please do this, more people need to pay attention to things like this that the media will rarely cover and never adequately.

But here are the cliff’s notes:

• Social Security is only 13 years from insolvency
• Social Security faces large (and rising) imbalances
• Social Security’s finances have improved slightly from last year, but it’s still really bad and the time needed to try to fix anything is rapidly running out

And here’s a lovely little summary from the objective and non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

The Social Security Trustees continue to warn that the program is significantly out of balance and just years from insolvency. Without reforms, Social Security will not to be able to pay full benefits to many current beneficiaries, let alone today’s workers and future generations. Action must be taken soon to avoid a 20 percent across-the-board cut to all beneficiaries in just 13 years.

Though changes in economic assumptions have slightly improved the trust fund outlook, it has not fundamentally changed its trajectory. The Trustees’ report also appears to rely on outdated economic assumptions that don’t consider the most recent inflation nor slowing growth.

Scared yet? Well, if you’d like some scary charts to back this up, they're in there!

Basically, the people who know the most about the inner workings of Social Security are saying some of the clearest and most dire things about it — as they have been for years. Nothing in this report takes into account what has happened in 2022, all their projections are based on 2021 assumptions for growth that have already proven very, very wrong in the last six months.

Bottom line: people who plan on qualifying for Social Security a decade or more from now should really make other plans.

I am.