2026 年社会保障和医疗保险受托人报告中的政治见解

Last week, the Trustees issued their annual Reports on the financial status of the Social Security and Medicare programs, reflecting changes in law, policy, costs, and economic and demographic conditions and assumptions since last year. Media attention was on the exhaustion dates of the relevant Trust Funds (2032 for the retirement and survivors’ portion of Social Security and 2033 for the hospital insurance portion of Medicare) and on the automatic benefit cuts projected to occur then if Congress does not act: 22 percent and 11 percent, respectively.  然而，这些报告还包含对政策制定者和公众可能同样重要的其他信息。

For Social Security, the Trustees significantly reduced the fertility and immigration assumptions, reflecting recent demographic trends and policy changes, and thereby lowering future income and payroll tax revenues.他们还纳入了 2025 年税法，降低了所得税税率，并设立了临时额外高级扣除额； 两者都直接降低了福利税的计划收入。 A few other changes were largely offsetting, so in total the long-run actuarial imbalance for the entire program (retirement, survivors, and disability) grew from -3.82 percent of taxable payroll last year to -4.42 percent this year, and from -4.84 percent in year 75 of the projection horizon to -6.57 percent. This matters because it represents the hole that Congress will have to fill, from tax increases and benefit cuts, to achieve long-range solvency in Social Security. As shown in Table 1, the funding gap has more than doubled since President Bush proposed reforming the program in 2005, while the exhaustion date has remained largely steady since 2012. If the fertility assumption were reduced further, from 1.75 in this year’s Report to 1.6, more reflective of recent and expected trends, the actuarial imbalance would grow again, to around -4.8 percent.

表 1

表 2