"...This question -- whether we can afford significant further delay in righting Social Security’s finances -- is a very common and important one, worthy of further exploration.
The answer is that we cannot afford continued postponement, and it’s important to understand why.
Social Security experts have long struggled against a widespread tendency to overemphasize the program’s “doomsday date” in descriptions of program finances. Countless media articles characterize the annual trustees’ report in terms of Social Security’s combined trust funds’ projected depletion date (currently 2034).
Such framing invites the following two misperceptions:
1) Insolvency might not happen, because projections that far out can be wildly wrong;
2) Even if it would happen, we have several years yet to deal with it.
Unfortunately, both of these reflexive suppositions are dangerously incorrect.
...However, even if we pretend that the funds are combined and that the insolvency date isn’t until 2034, we still have far less time than that to act..."
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