October 25, 2003
My Goof...and Kevin's
I figure this deserved its own post since the one right below this one is so long already.
Kevin made a big long post about how Social Security is only going to be about 7% of GDP. Yeah, one might be tempted to say, "Oh who cares."
Well I goofed and so did Kevin. We were looking at only OASDI. We forgot the HI portion of Social Security, Hospital Insurance, when we add that in it becomes 12.24% of GDP or about $45 Trillion by the time you get to 2080.
Oh yeah, and the increasing the income cap on income that the Social Security tax applies to? My rough back of the envelope calculations indicate it will raise a little over $4.2 Trillion by the time you get to about 2080. Now, I don't account for changes in population, increased interest income, and the income distribution is linear. Still I can't imagine I am off by more than double, and certainly not by the $22.7 Trillion Social Security will be in the hole for 2080 alone.
To view a table of the calculations click on the "Continue reading...." link. There will also be a link to code I used to calculate these numbers.
| Average Increase in Social Security Revenue | Years Additional Revenue is Collected | Income Group | Population In this Income Group | Total Increase in Social Security Income |
| 440 | 69 | 94,100 | 700,000 | 21,264,654,600 |
| 880 | 68 | 101,200 | 684,440 | 40,978,391,967 |
| 1,321 | 67 | 108,300 | 668,880 | 59,185,414,704 |
| 1,761 | 66 | 115,400 | 653,320 | 75,926,819,881 |
| 2,201 | 65 | 122,500 | 637,760 | 91,243,704,573 |
| 2,641 | 64 | 129,600 | 622,200 | 105,177,165,850 |
| 3,081 | 63 | 136,700 | 606,640 | 117,768,300,784 |
| 3,522 | 62 | 143,800 | 591,080 | 129,058,206,448 |
| 3,962 | 61 | 150,900 | 575,520 | 139,087,979,913 |
| 4,402 | 60 | 158,000 | 559,960 | 147,898,718,251 |
| 4,842 | 59 | 165,100 | 544,400 | 155,531,518,535 |
| 5,282 | 58 | 172,200 | 528,840 | 162,027,477,837 |
| 5,723 | 57 | 179,300 | 513,280 | 167,427,693,228 |
| 6,163 | 56 | 186,400 | 497,720 | 171,773,261,780 |
| 6,603 | 55 | 193,500 | 482,160 | 175,105,280,566 |
| 7,043 | 54 | 200,600 | 466,600 | 177,464,846,657 |
| 7,483 | 53 | 207,700 | 451,040 | 178,893,057,125 |
| 7,924 | 52 | 214,800 | 435,480 | 179,431,009,044 |
| 8,364 | 51 | 221,900 | 419,920 | 179,119,799,483 |
| 8,804 | 50 | 229,000 | 404,360 | 178,000,525,516 |
| 9,244 | 49 | 236,100 | 388,800 | 176,114,284,214 |
| 9,684 | 48 | 243,200 | 373,240 | 173,502,172,650 |
| 10,125 | 47 | 250,300 | 357,680 | 170,205,287,896 |
| 10,565 | 46 | 257,400 | 342,120 | 166,264,727,022 |
| 11,005 | 45 | 264,500 | 326,560 | 161,721,587,102 |
| 11,445 | 44 | 271,600 | 311,000 | 156,616,965,208 |
| 11,885 | 43 | 278,700 | 295,440 | 150,991,958,411 |
| 12,326 | 42 | 285,800 | 279,880 | 144,887,663,784 |
| 12,766 | 41 | 292,900 | 264,320 | 138,345,178,397 |
| 13,206 | 40 | 300,000 | 248,760 | 131,405,599,325 |
| Total | 4,222,419,250,749 |
Link to the code. If you have SAS, simply click on the link and copy and paste the code into your program editor and then submit. I wrote the code in SAS v8.2, but nothing is unique to 8.2 and should work on older versions of SAS.
Posted by Steve at October 25, 2003 01:14 AM