(Photo credit: Wikipedia)According to a Summary of the 2012 Annual Reports by the Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees, Social Security is expected to have depleted its funds a few years sooner than originally expected. Social Security’s trustees released new estimates of the benefit program, funded through dedicated payroll taxes that are intended to provide Americans a degree of economic security as they grow old and/or become disabled, predicting the retirement portion of the program will run dry by 2035. The United States’ single largest program benefits 44 million senior citizens and survivors of deceased workers.
The program’s Disability Insurance fund, supporting 11 million disabled Americans, is expected to run dry in 2016, and Medicare is now projected to be out of funds by 2024.
The trustees said that to keep the Social Security trust funds solvent over the next 75 years, Congress could take a number of steps:
- increase the payroll tax rate from its current level of 12.4 percent to 15.01 percent;
- reduce benefits by 16.2 percent;
- find alternative sources of revenue;
- adopt some combination of these approaches.
For my fellow mid 50 year olds, these numbers are not going to effect us. We will be receiving our check fully funded by the government. It's the 20, 30, and 40 year old workers who are going to pay the price for the governments mismanagement of the Social Security System. They are paying into a system that will probably never be able to give them the same level of benefit we see today.
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