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No need to speculate, the Board of Trustees spells it out in their annual report:
"The OASI Trust Fund and DI Trust Fund are projected to have sufficient reserves to pay full benefits on time until 2035 and 2028, respectively...continuing income to the trust funds at the time of reserve depletion would be sufficient to pay 75 percent of OASI benefits and 93 percent of DI benefits."
In other words - as soon as the earliest Gen-Xers reach retirement age (and, conveniently, when Baby Boomers can expect to no longer need to worry about this - given the current life expectancy of about 79 years), the reserves are gone...and those retiring Gen-Xers can expect to collect 75% of what their predecessors received. For Millennials, they can expect to collect 73%.
the current life expectancy for seniors is not 79 . that is from birth which is not relevant .that includes infant death , the sickly ,the weak ,the accident prone , druggies ,etc .
for a 65 year old man odds of seeing 85 are 42% , odds for a woman is 54% but for one in a couple it is a whopping 73% . in fact for a couple the odds of one seeing 90 is just below 50%. these numbers are a far cry from the 79 at birth , which is the 50% point where 1/2 go on and 1/2 die.
remember even from birth , it isn't you hit 79 and keel over and die . that is only the 50% point
Yes you are correct, pension plans like the old days are gone. Actually fewer and fewer companies even offer a pension.
A chicken/egg question: did traditional pensions become less common because employees started to switch jobs more frequently or did they switch jobs because pensions started to be phased out?
Absolutely not.
They'll fix it, but will wait until the last possible moment.
Don't expect anything to happen for quite some time.
Unfortunately, I suspect this is spot-on.
Knowing our politicians, the can will be kicked down the road until the crisis occurs in about 17 more years. Taking action NOW for something that won't manifest itself for another 17 years would require Leadership and foresight - if you think our politicians have those virtues, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you...
From the same Trustee report I linked to earlier: "The 75-year actuarial deficit for the combined trust funds under the intermediate assumptions is 2.83 percent of taxable payroll...to remain fully solvent throughout the 75-year projection period: (1) revenues would have to be increased by an amount equivalent to an immediate and permanent payroll tax rate increase of 2.76 percentage points...(2) scheduled benefits would have to be reduced by an amount equivalent to an immediate and permanent reduction of about 17 percent applied to all current and future beneficiaries, or about 20 percent if the reductions were applied only to those who become initially eligible for benefits in 2017 or later; or (3) some combination of these approaches would have to be adopted. If actions are deferred for several years, the changes necessary to maintain Social Security solvency become concentrated on fewer years and fewer generations...The Trustees recommend that lawmakers address the projected trust fund shortfalls in a timely way in order to phase in necessary changes gradually and give workers and beneficiaries time to adjust to them. Implementing changes sooner rather than later would allow more generations to share in the needed revenue increases or reductions in scheduled benefits and could pre- serve more trust fund reserves to help finance future benefits."
The only way it won't be around is if we stop collecting the payroll (and other) taxes which support it. So far as I am aware, there is not one single member of Congress supporting this idea.
Throughout the entirety of my working career, I have been unhappy with paying the SS deductions from my paycheck. I wish that Millennials and Generation Z were allowed to opt out of SS deductions. I remember being upset as a teenager about SS deductions. No one in Congress has ever supported the idea.
good thing they can't . most americans are awful investors and even worse savers
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