Get Your MoJo Rising
The 2005 Social Security Trustees report was released today and reported in hacktacular fashion by the AP, which seemed to get the most traction of any report on the news Web. The big news is that the year at which point full funding of Social Security benefits diminishes was pushed up to 2041 from 2042. There's a lot to digest from this report (especially by me, who barely made it out of one economics class in college), but here's an opening salvo from the Mother Jones MoJo blog about what's really needed to keep Social Security chugging away.

Assuming the Trustees' intermediate assumptions are realized, the deficit of 1.92 percent of payroll indicates that financial adequacy of the program for the next 75 years could be restored if the Social Security payroll tax were immediately and permanently increased from its current level of 12.4 percent (combined employee-employer shares) to 14.32 percent. Put this in people terms. Assuming we hiked taxes to that level, a young person making $30,000 today would have to pay an extra $288 a year, and his or her employer an extra $288. That's a bit of a chafe, and many would prefer not to lose that money to taxes (count me as one), but it's hardly the sort of thing that cripples an entire economy. Indeed, odds are Congress wouldn't even need to hike taxes by that much. For starters, there's good reason to think that Social Security's 75-year outlook is less bleak than the report thinks. Moreover, we could fix the slight imbalance through a combination of tax hikes and progressive benefit cuts for high-earners. Or we could decide not to raise the tax rate but instead levy payroll taxes on income above $90,000. Or we could boost immigration to improve the system's fiscal health. So in the end, maybe that young person would have to pay an extra $200, or $100, or less, to keep Grandma from eating garbage. Some catastrophe.

Hmmm. Doesn't sound that painful. Another point made by Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo--don't let your guard down:

Today, in newspapers and on websites across the country, headlines used words like 'broke', 'bankrupt' and 'bust' to describe what happens to Social Security when it starts running a deficit at some time in the middle of this century. Only weeks ago, President Bush was being forced to back off such misleading and deceptive language. And many Republicans were openly criticizing him for it. Now these are the words of choice in supposedly straight news reportage. Supporters of Social Security really don't have the luxury of letting one lie or distortion go unchallenged or unanswered.