Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Saturday, August 23, 2008

It's not a crisis

By Fester:



I'm stealing liberally from Hilzoy at Washington Monthly as she looks at the Congressional Budget Office assessment of Social Security and learns it is not a big problem...

Congressional Budget Office released new long-term Social Security projections (pdf):

"CBO projects that outlays will first exceed revenues
in 2019 and that the Social Security trust funds will be exhausted in
2049. If the law remains unchanged, the Social Security Administration
(SSA) will then no longer have the legal authority to pay full
benefits."


According to the CBO projections, "the 75-year actuarial imbalance
in the program amounts to 0.38 percent of GDP, or 1.06 percent of
taxable payroll." This sounds rather manageable.



One interesting note: like any attempt to project the economy
decades into the future, long-term Social Security projections are
bound to be inaccurate. It's therefore always interesting to see how
they change over time, as we inch closer to the dates they're talking
about. In 2006, the CBO projected
(pdf) that the Social Security trust funds would be exhausted in 2046.
Apparently, during the last two years, the date when the Social
Security trust funds will be exhausted has been pushed three years
further into the future. At this rate, if we keep on doing nothing,
that date will never arrive at all.

The CBO report is not the Intermediate Cost case from the OASDI Trustee report, so the years are slightly different.  However the CBO and the Trustees tend to track well with each other.  And they tend to have the same pessimistic bias in regards to a couple of their assumptions including immigration rates and productivity growth rates.



Doing nothing is an extremely viable policy option if the intent of the policy is to insure that there is a reasonable certain defined benefit pension plan for most Americans that keeps them above the poverty line in their old age.  Now if the goal of a policy is to provide loot or to renege on a multi-generation bait and switch scheme, then doing nothing is intolerable. 



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