Richie: You know as well as I do there IS a 'trust fund' - just not one in the way you, me or anyone else normally thinks of it.

There IS a ledger out there with all the FICA taxes coming in and all the benefits going out. For decades, the excess was placed into T-Bills. Those T-Bills, the ones owned by the Social Security Administration, were (and are) the 'trust fund'. Now there's not enough FICA coming in to cover the benefits going out - we knew this was going to happen when the baby boomers started retiring and it's been aggravated by the increase in lifespans and different benefit programs.

Roosevelt specifically designed Social Security this way to make it more unassailable - he wanted a separate tax so that it would be far harder to play with. He wanted it completely separate form the Federal budget. It wasn't until LBJ, if memory serves, that the government started using FICA surpluses to mask the true size of the deficit (I want to say it was because of the increasing costs of the Vietnam War but my memory could be fuzzy on that).