The Baby Boomer Claims Rush Is A Come As You Are Party

A panel appointed to review Social Security's future technology needs is wringing its hands about how the Social Security Administration is going to handle the crushing workload that will arrive when baby boomers begin retiring en masse.

In my opinion that is a naive concern. Retirement claims require little effort at Social Security. The agency's employees mostly spend their time working on claims filed by people who are not yet eligible for retirement benefits -- disability and survivor claims. Unlike retirement claims these take staff time. Disability and survivor claims go up as the population ages but the baby boomer peak for these claims has to be several years before the peak for retirement claims.

Has anyone at Social Security figured out when its baby boomer peak workload will actually arrive? I am guessing it will come in the next five years but there have to be people at Social Security whose job it is to project the agency's future staffing needs. When do they think the peak will arrive?

This matters because the upcoming wave of baby boomer retirements is being used as justification for long term technology project recommendations. Social Security needs long term technology planning but it is too late for any long term initiative to help with the baby boomer peak workload. That peak is is nearly here.

Union Awarded Attorney Fees

From Unity, the newsletter of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) local which represents most Social Security employees:

The Social Security Administration has been ordered to reimburse AFGE more than $100,000 in legal fees. That’s how much the Union spent when it represented 16 employees who were suspended for allegedly misusing the agency's computer system.

In her decision, Arbitrator Mary Bass ruled that management in the Northeastern Program Service Center (NEPSC) knew or should have known that the excessive penalties imposed on the employees could not be sustained. She also said the Union was entitled to that money in the "interest of justice."

Mr. Astrue Stood On The Affirmative Side

From the Huffington Post:

On Sept. 3, 2010, the Yale Political Union debated "Resolved: The Yale Class of 2014 should and will receive social security benefits" with National Commissioner of Social Security, Michael Astrue. This post contains speeches made by members of the Yale Political Union following Mr. Astrue's opening speech. Mr. Astrue stood on the Affirmative side of the resolution.

Does This Mean Anything?

This is from the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI). I would not jump to the conclusion that there is a connection between these two lines. In fact, I think there probably is no connection but it is an interesting chart.

Cutting Benefits For The Wealthy Won't Help

From Dean Baker writing at Firedoglake (emphasis added):

According to stories based on leaks from the [Deficit Reduction] commission, it is considering a plan to raise Social Security benefits for the lowest income beneficiaries. This is a great idea, since many of the elderly live at, or only slightly above, the poverty line. A modest increase in benefits would make a big difference in their standard of living.

However, the geniuses on the commission want to pay for this benefit increase by cutting the benefits of the “affluent” elderly. The problem with this plan is that there are very few genuinely affluent elderly and their benefits are not much higher than the benefits of normal people.

While we can raise lots of money by taxing the richest 1 percent of the population, since they earn such a disproportionate share of the country’s income, we cannot save much money by cutting their benefits. When billionaire investment banker Peter Peterson tells audiences that he doesn’t need his Social Security benefit, he is only putting $40,000 a year at stake. We can zero out the benefit for Peterson and his wealthy friends and not have to change a single number in the Social Security publications since the difference would be within rounding error.

In order to get any substantial sum of money to increase benefits for low-income elderly and to eliminate the long-term projected shortfall, it will be necessary to cut benefits for people who earned $35,000 -$40,000 a year during their working lifetime. This means cutting benefits for people who worked as schoolteachers, construction workers, factory workers and other very middle class or working class jobs.

Disability Claims Surge In Florida

From the St. Petersburg Times:

Florida's backlog of Social Security disability cases is poised to get even longer as unemployed workers flock to the program. ...

In 2007, 149,044 initial disability claims were filed in Florida, according to the Social Security Administration. By 2009, that number jumped nearly 33 percent to 197,960 claims. ...

Local experts say the reason for the uptick is simple: an aging population combined with a tanking economy.

"You have a double whammy," said Michael Steinberg, a Tampa attorney ...

No Social Security COLA This Year

It is not official yet but Bureau of Labor Statistics make it clear that there will be no Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) to Social Security benefits this year. There was no COLA last year, either. This comes as no surprise to those of us who keep up with such things but will undoubtedly come as a rude shock to most of those drawing Social Security benefits.

There is an effort in Congress to give everyone on Social Security a special $250 check to make up for the lack of a COLA but there is no sign of progress on that bill.

It Will Work Because It Has To Work. We Have No Choice.

As I have stated before, the key assumption of the "Re-Imagining" report, which recommends that the Social Security Administration pretty much eliminate its field operations and try to handle all of its business by computer, is that Social Security has no choice but to do this because there will be no other way for the agency to handle its upcoming workload. I have been hearing this same sort of language for a long, long time. In the past, this sort of talk has always preceded a disaster.

In 1994 Social Security officials began work on a project to "re-engineer" the process for giving disability claimants hearings. High-priced consultants produced reports recommending a dramatic re-organization. The reaction in the field was that the plan was crazy. I can recall going to a conference of the National Organization of Social Security Claimants Representatives (NOSSCR) and hearing a high level Social Security official describe the re-engineering plan. She took questions. I asked her what Social Security was going to do if the re-engineering plan failed. She replied most emphatically that re-engineering would work "because it has to work." She said that Social Security "had no choice."

You can see the obvious problem in this person's thinking. Ideas do not work because we need for them to work. They succeed or fail based upon their merits rather than upon our perceived need for them to work. Once you say that you have no choice, you close off alternatives and are liable to do something foolish. Thinking this way, a man who cannot make enough money to support his family might decide that his only choice is to buy lottery tickets.

Re-engineering was tried out on a limited basis. It failed and was abandoned before it could do much damage. Tens of millions of dollars were squandered on consultants.

Unfortunately, the notion that Social Security could not possibly get its work done without some productivity breakthrough did not go away. The next effort at a "Great Leap Forward", to use the term that Chairman Mao employed in China to describe something vastly larger but motivated by the same belief that there was no choice but to try a "Hail Mary" pass (to mix my metaphors to a cosmic extent), was called Hearing Process Improvement (HPI). This was another effort at a re-organization of Social Security's structure to give hearings to disability claimants. Again, we were told that there was no choice, that this had to be done to meet future needs. This time, Social Security did not let the dismal results of HPI's trials slow them down. They plowed ahead with nationwide implementation but they made sure to do it at the end of 2000 as the Clinton Administration was leaving office. With only an acting Commissioner of Social Security for many months into the Bush Administration, there was no one to pull the plug on HPI as hearing backlogs soared to horrendous, unimaginable levels. HPI has to rank as the most dramatic mistake in Social Security history.

Social Security never recovered from the HPI debacle during the Bush Administration, mostly because the agency lacked operating funds but also because the new Social Security Commissioner, Jo Anne Barnhart, was able to distract everyone with her own plan to end the agency's backlogs. This plan involved electronic files and something else which she really did not want to describe, other than to tell us that it would be wonderful. Again, Barnhart told us that there was no alternative to her plan, whatever it was. The electronic files were implemented at enormous expense. They have still not led to any dramatic improvement in productivity. The rest of Barnhart's plan, which she called Disability Service Improvement (DSI), just got delayed further and further. She kept the details a huge secret until near the end of the Bush Administration. Once the details were released, it was clear why she had kept her plan a secret. It was nothing more than another ill-conceived reorganization plan. Like HPI, DSI's implementation was delayed until Barnhart was nearly out the door. Fortunately, it was not rushed into nationwide implementation. DSI was another failure. The current Commissioner, Michael Astrue, learned that not long after taking office and began to stop it. I am not sure that DSI has been fully wound down even now, some three years later.

The moral to this long story is that we should be extremely wary of anyone with a plan for Social Security who tells us that there is no alternative to his or her plan.