Social Security

Paul Ryan's Fiscal Legacy: Lots of Red Ink

By Yuval Rosenberg

House Speaker Paul Ryan announced Wednesday that he won’t seek re-election this year and will retire at the end of his term in January, becoming the most prominent in a wave of Republican lawmakers...
Yellen, Democratic Economists Say Fixing Debt Crisis Isn’t All About Entitlements

By Yuval Rosenberg

Late last month, a quintet of big-name Hoover Institution economists warned in a Washington Post op-ed that a coming “string of perpetually rising trillion-dollar-plus deficits” could soon lead to a...
Which Americans Worry Most About Social Security?

By Yuval Rosenberg

Maybe call it social insecurity? Just over half of American adults between the ages of 50 and 64 say they worry a “great deal” about the Social Security system, according to recent polling by Gallup...
The Old Will Outnumber the Young in the US by 2035

By The Fiscal Times Staff

By 2030, all Baby Boomers will be older than 65, meaning that one in five U.S. residents will be of retirement age, the Census Bureau reports . And by 2035, seniors will outnumber children for the...
The $82 Trillion Problem Washington Has Stopped Talking About

By Yuval Rosenberg

Now that “the anti-deficit hysteria of the Great Recession has given way to a backlash of complacency,” lawmakers and the public are ignoring “an $82 trillion avalanche of Social Security and...

New Budget Projections Show a Rising Tide of Red Ink Ahead

By Michael Rainey

The Congressional Budget Office won’t release new budget projections that include the effects of the President Trump’s tax overhaul until April, but on Friday the deficit hawks at the Committee for a...
Why Trump’s Immigration Plan Could Hurt Social Security

By Michael Rainey

Economists have warned that the Trump administration’s plan to reduce immigration and deport thousands of unauthorized immigrants could impose significant costs in terms of lower growth and lost...
How Trump’s Budget Would Cut the Social Safety Net

By Yuval Rosenberg

As a candidate, President Trump said he would not cut Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. But his 2019 budget proposal seeks to reduce spending on all three programs and other parts of the social...
Why This Is a Bad Time to Turn a Blind Eye to the Deficit

By Yuval Rosenberg

In a Wall Street Journal column , Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder explains why Washington’s race to increase deficits through a combination of tax cuts and...
What Was Notably Absent from Trump’s State of the Union Address

By Yuval Rosenberg

President Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night lasted an hour and 20 minutes — the third-longest ever, just nine minutes shy of the record . The president touched on a long list of...

Why the GOP’s Debt-Financed Tax Cuts Could Come Back to Haunt Them

By Yuval Rosenberg

Republicans keep saying that their tax cut plan will pay for itself, despite a profound lack of evidence to support that argument. Even the most optimistic study, from the conservative-leaning Tax...
Should Failing Private Pension Funds Get a Federal Bailout?

By Marc Joffe

Bailing out pension funds by offering them unpayable loans simply kicks the can down the road and increases future deficits in a non-transparent manner. Worse, this approach could easily spread to...
The GOP’s Tax-Cut Two-Step

By Yuval Rosenberg

Liberal critics of the Republican tax plan have long warned that it’s just the first part of a two-step plan that, after adding $1.7 trillion to the nation’s long-term debt, would quickly lead to GOP...
Many Americans Don’t Trust Trump to Protect Social Security, Medicare

By Yuval Rosenberg

As a candidate, President Trump pledged to “save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security without cuts,” but nearly 60 percent of Americans heading into their retirement years don’t trust him to...
Why Pension Funds Have Fallen Behind, Even as Stocks Boom

By Richard Leong, Reuters

While U.S. corporate pensions regained some swagger after Wall Street’s record run this summer, they are still far from their heyday before the 2007-2009 credit crunch when they appeared to be in...