Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Memetrics
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktA few years ago I wrote a post asking Is Social Security Promising Too Much?, in which I attempted to demonstrate that the average retiree in 2011 could expect to receive a lot more in Social Security benefits than they ever paid in as FICA taxes. This was a retrospective look, so I used annual historical income levels, tax rates and treasury yields going back 53 years in order to calculate how much would have been paid in, how much compounded interest might have been earned, and how much benefit would be paid out based on those contributions. But because current SS tax rates have changed so much since the inception of the program, it recently occurred to me that it might make more sense to look at the question on a prospective rather than a retrospective basis, in order to see if changes to the program have made it any more viable. That is, rather than looking at a current retiree, I decided to look at a newcomer to the labor market, and calculate for various income levels how much the government would collect from them (at current rates) in FICA taxes over a lifetime of working, and compare it to what the SS benefits calculator says they can expect to receive in benefits when they retire, to see if the deal is a net gain or loss to the government.
The calculator actually makes this very easy, since it reports benefits in constant, 2016 dollars, and it assumes a constant income, also in 2016 dollars, from today until retirement day. So we can easily eliminate the complicating effects of inflation and assume a lifetime of constant dollars and no inflation. The last complicating factor is the issue of discounting future cash flows. $100 today is, generally speaking, worth more than $100 at some point in the future, so one would usually use a current interest rate curve to discount all future cash flows back to today in order to get a net present value (NPV) of all the cash flows. While not strictly correct, for the sake of simplicity I used a single discount factor for all cash flows, but I did look at each scenario under different interest rate assumptions.
So, I looked at a single, 22 year old in 2016, just entering the workforce, and assumed a constant income level for his entire working life, until he was 65. Then I ran the numbers on all income levels, in $10k increments, between $10K and $120k (since both taxes and benefits are capped at $118k of income), assuming current tax rates and benefits levels remain unchanged, and assuming 17 years of total benefit payouts (since the expected lifespan of a current 22 year old is roughly 82 years old). Then I discounted all future tax and benefit payments under various interest rate assumptions, to see if the entirety of the transaction from start to finish is a net positive or negative from the government’s perspective.
Below is a table of various income levels, along with both the annual tax receipts and annual benefit payouts associated with those income levels.
Income Annual Tax @12.4% Annual payout at age 65
10,000 1,240 8,988
20,000 2,480 12,348
30,000 3,720 15,552
40,000 4,960 18,756
50,000 6,200 21,948
60,000 7,440 25,152
70,000 8,680 26,976
80,000 9,920 28,476
90,000 11,160 29,976
100,000 12,400 31,476
110,000 13,640 32,976
120,000 14,880 34,248
And here is a table of the net present value (NPV) of all tax receipts and benefits paid for each income level at various discount rate assumptions.
Income 1% 2% 3%
10,000 (46,871) (18,535) (2,867)
20,000 (37,277) (3,084) 14,820
30,000 (26,117) 13,309 33,076
40,000 (14,958) 29,702 51,333
50,000 (3,679) 46,167 69,633
60,000 7,480 62,560 87,889
70,000 32,485 87,286 111,185
80,000 60,740 113,968 135,665
90,000 88,995 140,651 160,144
100,000 117,250 167,333 184,623
110,000 145,505 194,016 209,103
120,000 176,048 222,075 234,415
So at first glance this doesn’t look too bad. With interest rates even at just 1%, only those people in the lower half of the income scale would be expected to produce a net lifetime deficit for the government, while those in the upper half would produce a lifetime surplus. And with median income in the US at $52k we can assume a relatively normal distribution both above and below that income level, which means that, again at 1% interest rate levels, the surplus created by the upper income levels should be enough to cover (and even surpass) the deficit created by those at the lower income levels. Yes, this shows that SS is still essentially a wealth transfer program, not only from the young to the old, but also from the well paid to the less well paid. But at least it appears to be financially sound, and a higher interest rate environment only helps matters. With rates at 3% all but the very lowest income levels represent a positive NPV to the government, meaning that most people will be net contributors to, not takers from, the SS pool of benefits.
There is, however, one problem with this analysis. The only reason we discount future cash flows assuming an interest rate is that, generally speaking, a dollar today is worth more than a dollar a year from now because you can take a dollar today and invest it, producing more than a dollar next year. So, for example, at 3% interest rates, I can turn $1 today into $1.03 next year, meaning that $1 next year, discounted at 3%, is worth only (approximately) 97 cents today. An outflow of 97 cents today added to an inflow of $1 next year would produce a NPV of zero.
That being the case the problem with my above analysis is that the government doesn’t invest its revenues. The government simply spends the money that it gets. From the government’s perspective, a dollar today is worth the same as a dollar one year from now, because the government can’t take $1 today and turn into anything more than $1 next year. One might argue that the Social Security Trust Fund does invest its excess funds in government securities, but that is an accounting fiction. The “investment” is not made into any wealth generating venture. The only place to do that is in the private market. There is no growth, no new wealth creation, and as a result this “investment” produces zero real growth. So the proper discount factor to use when analyzing SS cash flows from the government’s perspective is, in fact, zero.
That puts the analysis in an entirely new light. At zero interest rates, which again is the real return produced by SS revenues, SS is a huge loser to the government at almost every income level.
Income 0% DF
10,000 (96,572)
20,000 (99,358)
30,000 (99,545)
40,000 (99,732)
50,000 (99,719)
60,000 (99,905)
70,000 (77,096)
80,000 (48,887)
90,000 (20,678)
100,000 7,531
110,000 35,740
120,000 67,748
Only the very top income earners ($100k+) produce a positive NPV for the government, and everyone at every income level up to $60k (ie more than half of the population) produces a negative NPV of nearly $100k per person. Social Security is a horrible deal for the government, and specifically for future taxpayers as they are the ones who will have to cover the ever widening hole that the SS model produces. If I did deals like this for my company, I would be fired in fairly quick order.
That being said, if SS is a bad deal for the government, it must be a good deal for individuals who are on the other side, right? After all, if the government is losing money on the deal, individuals must be making money. However, unlike the government, individuals could invest their contributions elsewhere if they weren’t forced to pay them into the SS trust fund, so it makes sense from their perspective to discount future cash flows at current interest rates rather than zero. It is true that, a very low interest rate environment, ie one close to zero, it actually is a pretty good deal for medium to low income earners. The NPV of the expected benefits vs expected contributions for incomes of $60k or less is nearly $100k for them. However, as rates rise, the deal quickly sours. With rates of 1%, nearly half of all income earners are under water on their SS deal, and by the time rates hit 2% only the lowest of income earners, those at $20k or less, have a positive NPV. By the time rates top 3%, pretty much everyone is getting less than they could otherwise have gotten.
So it turns out that SS is not only a bad economic deal for the government (ie future taxpayers), it’s even a bad economic deal for most individual recipients in most interest rate environments. So the question lingers: If SS is not viable program from the government’s perspective, and is a bad economic deal from the individual’s perspective, why in the world do we perpetuate this program?
Filed under: social security |
All Things in Moderation 
New post up.
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If it walk’s like a Ponzi scheme and talks like a Ponzi scheme…
Thanks Scott,great post.
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This is not a criticism. I am asking because I do not understand this part:
The “investment” is not made into any wealth generating venture.
I have always thought that the choice of lending at interest or investing in equity was determined by weighing the likely interest return and risk against the likely equity growth and risk. Thus, all else equal, a loan is an investment, for all practical and numerical purposes. Right?
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Mark:
Generally speaking yes, a loan is an investment. What distinguishes SS “investments” in government bonds is that it is simply the government “lending” to itself. Lending to yourself is not a real investment. If I take money from my savings account and “lend” it to my checking account in order to buy myself a car, would you say that I have made an investment via my savings account? Suppose I promised to replenish my savings account at a later date with even more money than I took out. Would that make it an “investment”?
That is the point. Unlike a real investment, the SS “investment” in government bonds is not a wealth producing transaction. It is merely a governmental promise, from itself to itself, to come up with more money in the future than it is spending today. That is not a return-providing investment in any real sense.
edit: To clarify more specifically (since I don’t think above I answered you directly), when I said that “The ‘investment’ is not made into any wealth generating venture”, I was not trying to distinguish between an equity investment and a debt investment. I was pointing out that lending money to oneself does not produce a return.
If I lend $100 to you for a year at an interest rate of 3%, at the end of a year I have $103. My wealth has grown, and this is true even if there was no net economic growth, and you have 3 dollars less than you had last year. It is still the case that my wealth has experienced investment growth. But if I lend $100 for a year to myself at 3%, say from my savings account to my checking account, at the end of the year my savings account may have 3 more dollars in it than before, but my checking account will have $3 less than it had, and so personally I have not gained anything. The “investment” has resulted in absolutely no growth in my net wealth at all. This is what happens when the SS fund buys government bonds.
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Thanks – I get your point.
Did you notice that Iran freed the Americans exactly when the major sanctions were lifted?
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Mark:
Did you notice that Iran freed the Americans exactly when the major sanctions were lifted?
I hadn’t noticed that. So it would appear that the Iranians successfully leveraged the hostages in negotiating the lifting of the sanctions. This is why Obama should have insisted on their release before even negotiating.
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@scottc1: “why in the world do we perpetuate this program?”
Superstition. It is believed by almost all American indigenous tribes that if you touch the scared Idol of Securitas Socialus, all elderly people will be immediately struck dead. As an an ancillary point, it is believed that the DC shaman that dares to touch the Securitas Socialus idol will be cursed with a fatal loss of incumbency. Few are brave enough to even contemplate it.
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@scottc1: “However, unlike the government, individuals could invest their contributions elsewhere if they weren’t forced to pay them into the SS trust fund, so it makes sense from their perspective to discount future cash flows at current interest rates rather than zero. It is true that, a very low interest rate environment, ie one close to zero, it actually is a pretty good deal for medium to low income earners. The NPV of the expected benefits vs expected contributions for incomes of $60k or less is nearly $100k for them. However, as rates rise, the deal quickly sours. With rates of 1%, nearly half of all income earners are under water on their SS deal, and by the time rates hit 2% only the lowest of income earners, those at $20k or less, have a positive NPV. By the time rates top 3%, pretty much everyone is getting less than they could otherwise have gotten.”
SS should have (if we’re going to do it) been set up as mandate to take that same money and put it into secured bonds. It is just the DC politician’s unshakable bias that money must come to and move through the government bureaucracy that gave us this particular Ponzi scheme. The goal was ultimately (irrespective the morality of the position) to provide retirement income for senior citizens in the last years of their life, or to be the equivalent of forcing them to save. Only the equivalent, SS, doesn’t force them to save, but rather takes money from the young to give to the old. Bush’s proposal (still purposely misunderstood or misreported on the left) had an idea to just take a little bit of that SS deduction and put it into a private account the citizen would own and could pass on, and the investments were limited to fix return instruments or index funds, which are, over time, non-volatile and show well over a 0% return.
Recently saw a Facebook meme about how, if Bush had “privatized” SS like he wanted to, all our senior citizens would have lost all their money and been out on the street after the latest Wall Street downturn. Such statements are essentially wrong in every single way, yet that’s what both the left and many otherwise non-partisan folks believe. Ergo, why we do not ever seriously talk about changing Social Security.
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Robert Reich was tweeting about “privatizing Social Security” on Friday with the market down a few percent… What about all those days when the stocks went up and bonds went nowhere? The left purposely misunderstands this and I am not sure why this concept is so toxic to them.
My only issue is that I do not want the government taking stakes in companies (via proxy) and using that stake to influence how companies run themselves.
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Brent:
My only issue is that I do not want the government taking stakes in companies (via proxy) and using that stake to influence how companies run themselves.
I totally agree with you on this.
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I have finally found a Kevin Williamson column with which I disagree (sort of).
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429894/ted-cruz-new-york-values-republicans-cities
Remarking on Ted Cruz’s “New York values” comment, Williamson says:
Our cities are disproportionately black, but they are not disproportionately Martian. Our cities have many immigrants, but not immigrants from the Land of People Who Don’t Care About Their Kids and Really Like Paying High Taxes. Ask a black Democrat in the Bronx working to support a family whether he’d prefer to make more money or less, to keep more of his money or less, to have more economic security or less, for his children to have more educational opportunities or fewer, and he will give the same answers as any plaid-panted Brooks Brothers specimen haunting the Merion Cricket Club — or any white oilman running a fracking rig in the Eagle Ford shale. His values are New York values, too.
When Ronald Reagan was elected, 74 percent of the U.S. population lived in cities; today it is 82 percent. From 2000 to 2010, the nation’s population grew by 9.7 percent — but the city population grew by 12.1 percent. And those urbanites are not entirely pleased with the Democratic monopolies that govern most of them: In Flint, the Democrats are literally poisoning the children; in Atlanta, the schools are so corrupt that teachers and administrators had to be sent to prison; elsewhere, urban Americans are literally up in arms (Molotov cocktails, at least) over their treatment at the hands of the city powers they interact with most often: the police. New York City is sliding back into pre-Giuliani chaos.
And what are Republicans doing? Sneering at “New York values,” when they should be seeking to satisfy the best of those values, such as the entrepreneurial spirit and the hunger for advancement — which are, after all, the best of American values, too.
If those urbanites are not pleased with the Democratic monopolies that govern them, then why do they help maintain the monopoly by continuing to vote for Democrats? New York is an especially egregious example, given that the monopoly was actually broken by Giuliani and Bloomberg, to great and wonderful effect, only to have the voters of NYC return the place to the clutches of a far left loon like DeBlasio. How can one not sneer at a city that does such a thing? The idea that, in a political context, NYC epitomizes the “best of American values” is crazy if you ask me.
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This is why I hate the whole “white privilege” argument… Why should the cultures that value education and success apologize to and lay down for the cultures that don’t?
Do people talk about Indian (as in the sub-continent) privilege? or Asian privilege? Don’t see a lot of poverty in the US with these people…
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BLM exists in large part to highlight Asian and Hispanic privelage.
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The Federalist seems to agree with me on the “NY values” issue:
http://thefederalist.com/2016/01/19/the-newyorkvalues-fight-is-a-loser-for-trump/
National Review’s Kevin Williamson thinks Cruz’s “sneers” at urban America are political mistake. He argues that big-city voters aren’t so different from the Republican base—or at least they shouldn’t be. “Our cities are disproportionately black, but they are not disproportionately Martian,” Williamson quips.
But for many Americans, particularly rural and suburban GOP primary voters, Manhattan might as well be on Mars. The reasons have nothing to do with race.
In 2015, the average price of a Manhattan apartment—apartment!—was more than $1 million. Imagine how that sounds to a family in Des Moines, where the median household income is $43,000 and a house (nobody in Des Moines buys an apartment) is less than $150,000.
Politically, the divide is even wider. In the first four GOP primary states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada), Mitt Romney averaged 48 percent of the popular vote against President Obama. In New York City, Romney got a minuscule 18 percent of the vote. In 91 NYC precincts, Mitt got zero votes. Zero.
In New York City, Michael Bloomberg is a “Republican.” In the “SEC Primary” states, he’s a socialist. While Trump may (or may not) be a Bloomberg, he’s certainly no Buckley. In fact, Trump isn’t even a Bob Michel—the sad-sack squish who led the House GOP during their days as the “permanent” minority.
Exactly.
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