FDR signing the 1935 SS Act (click image for person key)

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Spider and Bear: Early Versions of Soc Sec 101

My first foray into Social Security blogging (as opposed to commenting on other blogs) was with the launch of The Bruce Web in Nov 2004, or immediately after then President Bush announced he was going to use his "capital" to "reform" Social Security. The Bruce Web was mostly designed as a place to stash links and to work out some of my thinking, but the result was kind of a mini-course on Social Security finance as it looked at the time. The economic outlook is a lot different today and I won't be writing the new series of posts in quite the same way, but the fundamentals haven't changed and new students of Social Security could do worse than checking out the: 2004 archives including the one that explains how I got onto this topic to begin with: Trust Fund Exhaustion: a Personal Odyssey.

From 2004 through the 'There is No Crisis' movement of 2005 right to 2008 I was an active participant in every Social Security thread on every political and economics blog I ran across, and in time built enough cred that in May 2008 I was invited to write a Social Security series for the econoblog Angry Bear. The immediate result of that was a series of 44 numbered posts that I indexed back on my own site: Angry Bear Social Security Series

One main purpose of this new site is to rework the Nov 2004 and May-June 2008 series in light of the new (and grimmer) realities of the current recession/depression. Social Security is STILL not broken, but it CAN be broken by its enemies, and the push back against that is really what this site will be all about.

2 comments:

  1. Nice site Bruce. Good luck with this. Both in the success of the Web page and your ongoing effort to do nothing with SSA. Are you getting lonely yet with that view? I think there is 10 or 11 of you left standing. Certainly no one of influence in D.C.

    Of all the possible outcomes your approach is the least likely to be considered. Don't write back that they are all wrong and you are the only one right. You have too much to contribute to the process to just sit there and whine that nothing need be done.
    bk

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  2. Krasting I think the last laugh will be on me.

    People of influence in DC reached out to me and this blog is in part a product of that, in fact I secured a small but for me significant grant to elevate my blog related activity to a more intense level.

    See you around the 'sphere.

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