Michael Hiltzik: Social Security is perfectly healthy, but there’s one easy way to improve it

’Tis the season for hand-wringing over the fiscal condition of Social Security.

This annual event is invariably triggered by the release of the program’s trustees report, which occurred Friday. As is typical, the release inspired reams of journalistic and political alarmism about what will happen when the program’s reserves (that is, its two trust funds) are exhausted.

The trustees currently project that will happen in 2033. At that point, they say, current revenues from the payroll tax would be sufficient to cover 80% of currently scheduled benefits. That’s a year earlier than the projections in last year’s trustees report.

This sounded dire, superficially, and major news sources piled on. “Social Security funding crisis will arrive in 2033, U.S. projects,” the Washington Post reported. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which is an offspring of the late private equity billionaire and Social Security foe Peter G. Peterson, declared in the wake of the trustees’ report that “Social Security is 11 years from insolvency.”

The annual report lent urgency to a