Atrios:

Social Security trustees report comes out today. Get prepared for usual round of IT'S GOING BANKRUPT AND WE'LL HAVE TO CUT THEIR BENEFITS UNLESS WE CUT THEIR BENEFITS.

...and here it is. Quick glance says no substantial change from last year's projections. On to dig through and see what's up with the assumptions...

CNN:

Social Security looms for next president

The Social Security trustees issued their annual report Tuesday, and it showed how soon the system will run into trouble.

The problem is well-known: Funded by taxes on workers' wages, the Social Security system currently takes in more funds than it has promised to pay out to retirees. And the federal government has been borrowing those surplus funds over the years. But that surplus is shrinking, and eventually the system won't be able to pay out all of the promised benefits.

The trustees estimate that by 2017, the funds going in to Social Security will be less than the benefits promised.

This is the same half-baked information we've been hearing for a while. The truth, as they obscurely refer to further down in the article, is that if we do absolutely nothing, the SS office will stop being able to make 100% of payouts in 2041 (it will at that point be able to pay out at 80%). The obvious and simple solution to this is to raise the income cap at which SS taxes are paid (currently you don't pay for SS taxes over about $100,000 of your salary, assuming you make that much). This should be done (and i'd like to see a push to actually expand SS benefits) but there is certainly no crisis.

If we want to worry about potentially unsolvent government programs, we can look at Medicare, but the real issue here is that there is a strong push to make people think that their Social Security benefits won't be there for them when they retire. Once people are convinced that SS is in trouble, they can push to privatize the benefit, which means putting it in the hands of the people who recently invested all of their money in worthless mortgages.