The Future of Social Security

Social security has been the most, perhaps the only, popular social welfare program in the United States. Until recently it has steadily expanded in coverage, beneficiaries, and costs with little fanfare or notice. Since the mid-1970s that expansion has begun to threaten its financial soundness. Literal bankruptcy has become a short-run possibility as expenditures continually outrun receipts. Worse, in some respect, is the realistic possibility that the retirement costs of the baby-boom generation in the twenty-first century may be too great a burden for future workers to bear. How well social security has done, is doing, and is projected to do are analyzed in terms of the system's twin goals of adequacy and individual equity. Options for change are severely limited by our stumbling economy and the high costs of a mature pension system. It is not likely that the traditional groups and alliances that played important roles in the expansion of social security will play predictable roles in its retrenchment.