It’s getting to be that time again when the Social Security and Medicare Trustees release their annual report on the programs’ 75-year outlook. This report is the source of valuable information, but it often causes confusion because of the different conclusions that can be drawn depending upon whether one looks at trust fund balances, which are positive, or at cash flows, which are negative.
 
Is the glass half-full or half-empty?
 
The Concord Coalition has always stressed the importance of cash flows over trust fund balances. As the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has observed, government trust funds “have important legal meaning but little economic or budgetary meaning.”1
 
This is because trust fund “assets” are nothing more than promises from the government to pay itself a lot of money in the future regardless of whether any resources have been saved for that purpose. Trust fund balances are thus easily manipulated to increase their claims on general revenues.
 
Two recent examples demonstrate why trust fund balances should be taken with a grain of salt. One involves a grant of spending authority (new bonds) to the Social Security trust funds unsupported by any new income. The other involves cutting spending from Medicare and raising Medicare payroll taxes to...

Anyone wondering why Social Security and Medicare should be “on the table” in budget negotiations need look no further than the 2011 Trustees’ Report issued on May 13.

As is usually the case, media accounts of the trustees’ report tended to focus on trust fund balances rather than on the cash balances and growing costs of the two programs. Viewed from a trust fund perspective, the financial condition of Social Security and Medicare may appear troubling but of no immediate concern. Social Security’s combined trust funds are projected to remain solvent until 2036 and the Medicare HI trust fund [Part A] is solvent until 2024. The Medicare SMI trust funds [Parts B and D] are permanently solvent, but only because they have an automatic draw on general revenues.

So why worry about these programs now? Why not wait another 10 years before making changes in Medicare and 20 years or more for Social Security?

One reason is that both programs are straining the federal budget now because they are paying out more than they are taking in from dedicated resources, including payroll taxes, taxation of...

Urban Institute scholar Gene Steuerle has run the numbers and found that for Medicare, retirees are getting a really good deal.

In a fascinating set of calculations, Steuerle and colleague Stephanie Rennane, looked at both Social Security and Medicare and estimated the levels of benefits relative to taxes (and premiums for Medicare) paid for many different levels of income and years of retirement.

For Social Security, prior generations received substantially more benefits than taxes paid, while current retirees and those in the future who earn average and above-average wages are scheduled to receive slightly less cash benefits than taxes paid. The lowest income workers are scheduled to still get more in benefits than taxes paid. 

For Medicare, however, their conclusion is that, "Past and current retirees, and most working age adults, will never pay for all of their benefits."

The basic reason is that Medicare payroll taxes, which only go towards Medicare Part A (hospital insurance), combined with premiums (which are set at levels to pay for about 25 percent of Medicare Part B costs), only cover 51 to 58 percent of total Medicare ...

The Social Security Administration announced on Friday that for the second year in a row there would be no cost-of-living increase in Social Security benefits for 2011.  Why not?  As the SSA explains, this is a straightforward, non-political determination based on historical economic data:

The Social Security Act provides for an automatic increase in Social Security and SSI benefits if there is an increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) from the third quarter of the last year a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) was determined to the third quarter of the current year.

Very objectively, there will be no cost-of-living increase in Social Security benefits in 2011 because there was no increase in the cost of living, as measured by the CPI-W, from the 3rd quarter of 2008 (the last time a COLA was triggered, for 2009 benefits) to the 3rd quarter of 2010.  The latest data on consumer prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the...