Sources and References

Government and Neutral Sources

The American Academy of Actuaries
     Probably the gold standard of nonpartisanship, the Academy takes stands on the actuarial issues and works to frame the debate objectively. While it does not take positions on individual issues, it has a "do it yourself" exercise that allows individuals to pick the options they'd choose to bring Social Security back into balance over the next 75 years.

Congressional Budget Office
     The CBO is chartered with providing Congress with non-biased financial impact statements for existing and pending legislation. As such, it provides it's own projections on Social Security's financial status and projects the costs of various alternatives presented by Representatives and Congressmen. It's projections are somewhat more optimistic than those of the Social Security actuaries' intermediate assumptions, a consequence of some rather small, honest differences in assumptions about the future.

PublicAgenda.Com
     Source for material about Social Security and arguments from both sides, including totally neutral explanations, arguments from both sides, polls and statistics. Particularly good for anyone engaged in a formal and structured debate, but also an excellent place for those seeking to know about the issue in a non-polemic way.

Social Security Administration
     Much has been made recently of the politization of the Social Security Administration's message, but the web site is still an excellent resource for individual questions about benefits and, more generally, information on how benefit are calculated under current law and the history of Social Security.
     Of particular interest to the actual debate are the annual Trustee's Reports and the Office of the Chief Actuary's valuation of various proposals for modifying the system.