Steven Engelhardt

Finally moved to action by a comment on QandO, I decided to go through the history of the Social Security Trustees’ Reports to plot the year that the combined Social Security OASDI trust fund is predicted to expire vs. the year the prediction was made. Here is the resulting graph:

Here are the files I used to generate the plot:

• oasdi-exhaustion.dat: The raw data (created by scanning through past Social Security trustees’ report summaries)
• oasdi-exhaustion.plot: The gnuplot input file which generates the graph

It appears that the Social Security trust fund has been predicted to run out in “about 30 years” for over 10 years straight.

(Yes, I am familiar with the arguments that the Social Security trust fund, isn’t.)