A brighter economic outlook has helped push Social Security's projected trust fund depletion date to a year later. But there's still urgency for Congress to act.
To me the only metric for how well it’s managed is whether people get paid the correct amount on time. Ultimately the money comes from the same place as all Federal money: it’s willed into existence on demand. Any SSA “sound money management” is theater. Our income being taxed in order to fund Social Security is essentially theater as well.
and yet, in a political economy where the theater is a requirement and this program has been under ideological assault since its inception, this program manages to succeed and maintain a heightened requirement of auditing/reporting that other progams elide, while having negligible administrative/overhead costs.
personally, i am impressed by the civil servants who get it done while being shat upon constantly in the press and by “non-partisan” think tanks, both owned and operated by anti-entitlement billionaires who pay more to destroy the program than they have ever paid into it.
To me the only metric for how well it’s managed is whether people get paid the correct amount on time. Ultimately the money comes from the same place as all Federal money: it’s willed into existence on demand. Any SSA “sound money management” is theater. Our income being taxed in order to fund Social Security is essentially theater as well.
and yet, in a political economy where the theater is a requirement and this program has been under ideological assault since its inception, this program manages to succeed and maintain a heightened requirement of auditing/reporting that other progams elide, while having negligible administrative/overhead costs.
personally, i am impressed by the civil servants who get it done while being shat upon constantly in the press and by “non-partisan” think tanks, both owned and operated by anti-entitlement billionaires who pay more to destroy the program than they have ever paid into it.
There’s a great example of such a character in the first season of Homecoming, a show I highly recommend, the first season especially.