Do Social Security Surpluses Pay Down Publicly Held Debt. Evidence From Budget Data

摘要

Being fair to future generations requires that Social Security be reformed in a manner that effectively prefunds a significant share of future Social Security benefit payments. All serious reform plans have this property. Prefunding is attempted exclusively in the Social Security trust fund in some plans, and it is attempted partly in personal retirement accounts in others. Many analysts believe that Social Security surpluses are offset all or in part by lower non-Social Security surpluses. If the offset is 100 percent, then running Social Security surpluses does not increase the governments capacity to pay future Social Security benefits. In this case, reforms that rely on trust fund accumulations to make Social Security fair to future generations do so at the expense of a non-Social Security policy that is less fair to future generations. The evidence on whether or not trust fund accumulations pay down federal debt is of two general types: formal statistical analyses of historical budget data, and informal observations of budget politics.