Social Security insolvent sooner than expected!

BOSTON, Massachusetts (PNN) - May 8, 2015 - A new study has revealed “biased” forecasts by the Fascist Police States of Amerika Social Security Administration, suggesting the health of the system on which millions of Amerikans depend for their retirement is seriously overstated.

The study was published Friday in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, co-authored by Harvard Professor Gary King, a Ph.D. student at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and an assistant professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice.

In a second article, published Friday in Political Analysis, the Harvard-Dartmouth team attributed the growing bias to the “antiquated, ad hoc methods” of creating forecasts. They suggest that otherwise laudable efforts to insulate the forecasts from political influence have resulted, somewhat ironically, in insulating the process from data that could improve their accuracy.

“The bias in their forecasts results in a picture that’s rosier than it really is,” said King. “They’re not saying the system is in good health. Pretty much everybody who evaluates Social Security realizes there’s a problem. But the system is in significantly worse shape than their forecasts are indicating.

“This is a major problem,” he continued. “Social Security is the single largest government program. It lifted an entire generation of elderly out of poverty, and today affects the lives of almost every Amerikan. The forecasts are essential for ensuring the solvency of the Social Security trust fund, as well for Medicare and Medicaid, which together add up to half the entire budget of the federal government.”

The study found that inherent bias in the forecasts has become more pronounced since 2000.

“The study compared all forecasts made by SSA over the 80-year history of the program with its actual outcome, and found that its forecasts of the health of Social Security trust funds have become increasingly biased since 2000. Current forecasts are likely off by billions of dollars, and the program could be insolvent earlier than expected unless legislators act (now),” the study found.

While forecasting the health of the Social Security trust funds has long been part of the program - each year, the administration creates forecasts that look one, five, 10, 20, and even 75 years into the future - the study conducted by the Harvard-Dartmouth team is the first by anyone inside or outside the government to evaluate their accuracy.

“It’s typically been difficult to conduct studies that evaluate forecasts, but the Social Security Administration has been around long enough that if (it) made a 10-year forecast a decade ago, by now we can look to see how (it) did,” said Samir Soneji, assistant professor at Dartmouth and co-author of the study. “There’s tremendous scientific value in evaluating real-world forecasts that were made by people who were really trying to figure out what the future was going to be like.”

What they found, King said, was that while forecasts were never perfect, they were largely unbiased for quite some time.