How Social Security is impacted by changes to the workforce

Social Security is financed on what's called a pay as you go basis, which means that the taxes paid in by today's workers immediately go out the door to pay benefits for today's retirees. That means that Social Security is very subject to demographic changes to the number of workers per retiree. If you go back to the 1960s, we had five or six workers paying in for every retiree collecting benefits from the system.Today, we have about three. Going forward, we'll only have around two workers per beneficiary. ...