Quote:
Originally Posted by Guest
This is not exactly true. There actually is a SS trust fund and it has $2.6T. Unfortunately, it contains $2.6T in IOUs from the Treasury Department to SS. These IOUs represent a commitment by the Treasury Department to go out on the global markets to borrow money to pay SS benefits. The reason the "trust fund" contains $2.6T is that SS took in more in SS tax then they paid out in benefits for a long period of time. The excess went into the General Fund (i.e. was spent) and Treasury gave SS IOUs in exchange. What should have happened was SS taxes should have been adjusted annually to match the benefits paid. In this case, we would have $2.6T less debt today.
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Yes, excellent point. A common misconception is that there's a big wad of money sitting safely in a "bank" or trust fund waiting to be tapped. It's all basically a big IOU and depends on current intake to ideally be at least a bit more than the payout.
I agree with previous poster ... mismanagement by at least a generation of politicians from both parties. They do what they all do ... kick the can down the road and hope that, if/when something hits the fan, they will be safely out of office. This is one topic where R's and D's can be genuinely bipartisan.