Stochastic Model Of The Long-Range Financial Status Of The OASDI Program. Actuarial Study No. 117

摘要

Each year the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) and Disability Insurance (DI) Trust Funds provides three separate sets of long-range (75-year) assumptions for key demographic and economic variables that affect the future financial status of the combined OASI and DI (OASDI) programs. The intermediate (alternative II) set of assumptions represents the Trustees best estimate for future experience, while the low cost (alternative I) and high cost (alternative III) sets of assumptions are more and less favorable, respectively, from the perspective of the trust funds future financial outlook. The Office of the Chief Actuary (OCACT) of the Social Security Administration (SSA) uses the three sets of assumptions to project the principal factors affecting the financial status of the OASDI program. Taken together, these three projections give policy makers a sense of the range of variation in the assumptions and in the financial status of the OASDI program. However, this deterministic approach makes no attempt to assign values to the likelihood of these sets of assumptions.