Let me chum the waters here and get the shark frenzy going. After the victors chase the losers away (or eat them) maybe we can start again with clearer and calmer waters.
Social Security does not contribute to the deficit.
Social Security ran $37 billion cash flow negative last year.
Social Security has $2.6 trillion in fully callable assets in Trust.
Social Security has a projected $5.4 trillion unfunded liability over 75 years.
Lets throw in some more
Social Security ran a $72 billion surplus last year.
Social Security added $72 billion to Public Debt last year.
Couple more
Social Security goes bankrupt in 2037
Social Security will be able to pay a real benefit in 2038 25% better than the one it pays today.
Just to pile on
Public Debt is not the same as Debt Held by the Public
Unfunded liability is not Debt at all.
All ten statements are perfectly true. If carefully defined. But opponents of Social Security delight in blurring those definitions and sliding from one to another taking advantage of common misconceptions. For example a lot of people think that 'Public Debt' is a simple sum of annual 'Deficits'. It isn't. In fact in 2000 both Social Security and the General Fund ran surpluses, yet Public Debt still edged up.
The people around Peter G Peterson claim that Social Security is imposing some huge 'debt' obligation on our grandchildren, and so should be addressed through comprehensive 'deficit' legislation. But 'unfunded liability' is not debt at all, and though it can be slashed by legislation in the present, that will not in turn actually change 10 year or even 20 year deficit numbers.
'unfunded liability' is a technical term deployed by the Social Security Administration's Office of the Chief Actuary to measure a projected gap between income and cost.
'surplus/deficit' (and worse 'primary surplus/deficit) are technical terms deployed by OMB and CBO to measure the difference between 'revenue' and 'outlays' in a given year
'Public Debt' is a measure used by Treasury to sum up a certain category of legal obligation by the Treasury to other entities, including but NOT limited to the 'public' as normally conceived
Attempts to just slide from one measure to another will just tie you into numeric, definitional and logical knots, instead they are used by different agencies for different purposes to measure quite different things.
For example 'cash flow negative' does not equate to 'adding to the deficit' in relation to
Social Security. Nor does it equate to 'increasing Public Debt'. But it MIGHT mean an increase in 'Debt Held by the Public', a quite different thing.
I plan to introduce some posts going forward trying as best as I can to deploy these concepts and associated numbers as they are in the actual public Reports. At times this will seem to do violence to simple language and math.
Well as it turns out there is very little that is simple here.
(two small edits after publication)