Politology: Graphing Social Security

The Politology blog took a break from covering the bankruptcy bill to provide a graphical presentation on the future of the Social Security trust fund. I've attempted to explain in words what the issues are, as I understand them myself, but these graphs lay out the basic issue quite clearly and simply.

The first graph shows what the president has been talking about. (The graphs are generated dynamically, so I cannot copy them into this post.) Around 2018, the trust fund will go into deficit. In other words, from this point on we will be taking more money out of the fund than we are putting in. This chart shows essentially the rate of growth of the trust fund, which will be negative after about 2018.

The second graph shows the ratio of trust fund assets to expenditures (this can be thought of qualitatively as the actual value of the trust fund) over time. This shows that the fund will have a positive value until the early 2040's.