What is the status of the Social Security Trust Fund?
According to Treasury financial statements, the Social Security program took in $647 billion in income and paid out $487 billion in benefits in fiscal year 2004. The trust fund balance on September 30, 2004, was $1.635 trillion. The 2004 Social Security Trustees’ Report projects that under the most likely scenario, Social Security will remain in surplus on a cash basis until 2018. Beginning that year, the Trustees project that Social Security will need to draw down the trust fund to help pay benefits. The Trustees expect that Social Security will have sufficient resources to pay full benefits until 2042, nearly four decades from now. (The Congressional Budget Office projects that the system will be able to pay full benefits even longer, until 2052.) At that point, the trust fund will exhaust its reserves, but incoming Social Security tax revenues will still cover about 73 percent of benefits, according to the Trustees. The Trustees project that the present value of the shortfall betwee
