[noprogs]

Now, I’m about to disagree with myself.

I WAS WRONG!

Of course, this is using the .gov figures. Total expense of SS was $877 billion and total benefits paid was $707 billion while putting $2.8 billion into the “trust fund”.

That’s about a 20% overhead cost.

Of course, the SSA claims less than 1% “administrative” costs.

So, the .gov is off by a factor of 20 while I missed by a factor of 3.

Source: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4a5.html

This gives the total payouts of $706.821 Billion.

Source: http://www.ssa.cov/oact/ProgData/fyOps.html

This puts the total inputs at $878 Billion and $2.8 Billion to the fund in 2014.

I do not know if this includes all employee benefit expenses, insurance, facility rent/amortization.

[riverdawg]

An overhead ratio of 20% still seemed high to me. After all, unlike private charities, SSA does not have to engage in fund-raising! So, I dug around for a few minutes and discovered that your $706b figure is probably OASI alone. In addition, SSA paid out $142b in DI and $50b in SSI in FY 2014, for a total payout of $893b. Page 26 at the following link has the FY 2014 data:

http://www.ssa.gov/finance/2014/Full%20FY%202014%20AFR.pdf