A Stopped Clock That's Never Right

Back to Social Security again. Kevin Drum points out that predictions of SS bankruptcy keep pushing the doomsday farther into the future.

I commissioned the chart on the right from the crack Political Animal graphics team. It shows the last decade's worth of Social Security predictions, and it turns out that back in 1994 the Social Security trustees were predicting that doomsday was....

35 years away.

That's right: even though ten years have passed, doomsday is now farther away than it was in 1994. As every year goes by, the doomsday schedule moves out another year too.

Maybe Kevin should graph the "years until meltdown" instead of the calendar year of the meltdown. From his chart, it's not intuitively obvious that the number of years remaining until doomsday is going up or down, because his Y and X axes are at different scales (roughly 2:1). Still, good stuff.