6/16/2015 – CBO: Social Security Shortfall Quadrupled Since 2008 (Forbes)

The Congressional Budget Office today released its annual Long-Term Budget Outlook, showing that Social Security’s long-term funding gap has more than quadrupled since 2008.  But don’t hold your breath waiting for reform to happen.

The CBO measures the Social Security 75-year funding shortfall at 4.4 percent of taxable payroll. That means that an immediate and permanent 4.4 percentage point increase in the Social Security payroll tax, from 12.4 to 16.8 percent of wages, would be enough to keep the program’s trust fund solvent over the next 75 years. Alternately, we could immediately cut benefits across the board by about 23 percent. Or we could wait, and phase in even larger tax increases and benefit cuts over time.

Read the full article in Forbes.