Description: This article discusses Social Security amendments of 1983 that include triggering devices based on trust-fund ratios that affect the funding or benefits of the system for both OASDI and Medicare.

Description: Highlights the recent changes to Social Security and Medicare from enactment of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. Also highlights some changes voted in by one of the houses but not by both, and therefore not enacted.

Description: The Social Security Act provides that, on or before April 1 of each year, the Board of Trustees of the OASDI trust funds and the two Medicare trust funds should submit to Congress reports presenting statistical operational data, future cost estimates, other actuarial analyses, and financing recommendations. The 1975 Report shows the worsening financial plight of the program.

Description: This article is a review of the 1977 book “The Future of Social Security,” by Alicia H. Munnell, formerly on the staff of the Brookings Institution and now an Assistant Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The author of this review notes that the financial problems of the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program have drawn considerable public attention during the past few years, and this has produced quite a number of books and papers on the subject with various recommendations as to what should be done about the future of the program. The reviewer thinks highly of this book, which covers the philosophical questions of individual equity vs. social adequacy, and the question of the effect of OASDI on savings and capital accumulation. Note: A detailed review of the book will appear in the Transactions.

Description: In 1938 and 1941, tax rulings were issued that Social Security benefits were not subject to income tax. This was done largely on the grounds that they are governmental gratuities probably based on the fact that the benefits and the taxes financing them were in different titles of the Social Security Act. Periodically over the years, proposals were made to include the benefits in taxable income in the same manner as private pensions.

Description: This article is a review of the report, An Actuarial Audit of the Social Security System, by Robert S. Kaplan and Roman L. Weil. Mr. Myers suggests that economists were not the appropriately chosen authors for an actuarial audit.

Description: This article describes a report by the GAO that was prepared at the request of Congressman Wolff. Robert J. Myers, the author of the article, that the GAO report is “an excellent summary of the various recent studies on the financial problems confronting the OASDI system. Four of the studies have been recently reviewed in The Actuary: An Actuarial Audit of the Social Security System by Kaplan and Weil April 1975, the 1975 Trustees Report June 1975, Report of the Panel on Social Security Financing to the Committee on Finance, U.S. Senate May 1975, and Reports of the Quadrennial Advisory Council on Social Security October 1975. Also considered in the report are editorial comments by The Wall Street Journal which first impelled Congressman Wolff to request the GAO Report.”

Description: This article explains the changes to Social Security as of the end of 1967.

Description: The author discusses a perceived loophole in the Social Security system whereby an employer could reduce employees’ wages by all or a portion of their Social Security payroll tax and then pay this tax for the employees. This procedure, which had been little used through the years except by householders employing domestic workers, was dubbed “FICA-II,” and the article notes that 1980 legislation prohibited the practice other than for domestic workers and a few other limited exemptions.

Description: The article notes, as explained in Norman Solomon’s paper, TSA XV, 167, so-called windfall appropriations are required annually to finance dual benefits to which certain railroad workers became eligible under the Railroad Retirement Act in consequence of pre-1975 employment that entitled them to both Railroad Retirement and Social Security benefits. The author then notes that the Office of Management and Budget has arbitrarily reduced revised appropriations, and that “the actuarial profession should take a strong stand against this by-passing of actuarial determinations.”