In 1983, the main Social Security trust fund came within months of being exhausted. Max Richtman, the president and chief executive of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, told me he thinks it’s too long. He wrote in a recent Substack post that even 75 years isn’t long enough to look ahead. That’s three times the size of the gap in today’s dollars when projecting ahead 75 years. Making Social Security safe for only 75 years effectively assumes that all beneficiaries will “conveniently expire” at the end of the 75th year and so won’t need checks, he said.

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Persons: Alan Greenspan, Max Richtman, it’s, ”, “, he’d, Laurence Kotlikoff, I’ve, there’s, Steve Laffey, Kotlikoff, aren’t, ” Laffey Organizations: Social Security, National Committee, Preserve Social Security, Boston University Locations: Cranston, R.I