Hassett: Recession Bites Into Social Security’s Surplus

Following up on Thursday's post on the shrinking Social Security surplus, Kevin Hassett of AEI writes for Bloomberg:

Something extraordinarily important was revealed in mid- March and received almost no news coverage. If you typed in the words "Social Security" on Google's news service last Friday, the top hit was a New York story about a man who kept his dead mother in a freezer ever since she died back in 2007, just so he could continue to collect her benefit checks.

Almost as gruesome is the news about Social Security's finances.

Hassett discusses work by Chuck Blahous on whether the Social Security Trustees projections have been pessimistic, why surpluses may not recover as strongly as some think, and recommends a bipartisan commission similar to that in 1983.