But worse than over-spending on a system that cares for our elderly is the corrupt giveaways of taxpayer assets to the special interests that fund the political elections. Perhaps if we eliminated that we could reduce taxes and at the same time resolve our SSI and health care problems.

Jack Lohman
http://MoneyedPoliticians.net

- The bumps in January, April, June and September in what the CBO calls “revenues”, what SocSecurity calls “contributions”, and what everybody else calls the payroll tax are indeed due to those who file quarterly. Related to that, the huge spike in April, as well as the smaller spike in March, are due to those who should file quarterly but forget.
- The separate bumps in January, April, July and October are due to most of the taxed Social Security benefits hitting the “trust fund” those months.
- The semi-annual bumps in “interest” (June and December) are when the interest on the long-term bonds are compounded.

As for how that stacks up to the last 12 months figures are available, the 4 months that had a monthly primary surplus were Septmeber 2008, January 2009, March 2009 and April 2009. Notably, neither June 2009 (the tax-year/calendar-year 2009 2nd quarter for quarterly-filers) nor July 2009 had a monthly primary surplus.

In reference to the second question, those are fiscal years, which begin October 1 in the Federal world. I’m not going to hazard a guess on whether calendar-year 2009 will end up in the red, but I note that the CBO is suggesting that August and September will come in at a $14 billion primary deficit. That would mean October-December would have to come in at about a $21.5 billion primary deficit to put Social Security in the red for CY2009.

1) am I right in assuming that the quarterly bumps in inflows are due to quarterly filers (self-employed)? Those are big numbers, almost so big that a slight decline in payments from those filers (whomever they are) would be bad news. Do we know who they are?

2) Do the funds follow a calendar year or a federal year, for accounting purposes? I ask because I was wondering what it would take to push the 2009 results into the red, and so how far we are through the year really matters. If it’s a calendar year and the 2009 year shows a decline of 3.495% instead of a decline of only .08%, then the “Trust Fund” looks like it could be in current deficit as early as this year. Either way, 2010 is staring us in the face (maybe as soon as next month, if the fund follows a federal accounting year).

Thanks for the work.