Ronald Reagan was cutting advertising telling people that Social Security was going to go bankrupt in a generation back in 1961.

Then he took office in 1980 (after he’d predicted bankruptcy) on the position and “fixed” SS by raising taxes on low income Americans and gutting their benefits. But the subsequent multi-trillion dollar trust fund didn’t satisfy SS scalds. They still insisted it was going bankrupt, so Republicans raised taxes and gutted benefits again under Clinton and Gingrich, while introducing alternative privatized savings programs (401k, IRA, etc).

But that still didn’t satisfy scalds. They tried to privatize the program in 2005 under Bush Jr. That failed, but we still got an earful about how SS was going to fail in the next 20 years if we didn’t do something. So then Obama tried to pass another round of cuts and tax hikes in 2013, but Republicans killed that too. So then Trump claimed we were headed to a Fiscal Cliff in 2017, and tried to privatize SS, but Republicans refused to pass that either.

At this point, we’ve passed repeated deadlines under which SS was supposedly going to fail. The 1970s, the 1980s, the 2000s, the 2020s… We’re still waiting on the Big Cliff in 2037, but since COVID killed several million people far sooner than expected, that’s thrown the math of significantly.

I anticipate we will continue to hear people predicting the end of SS until Congress finally finds the majority they need to kill it.