easyt65
Diamond Member
- Aug 4, 2015
- 90,307
- 61,193
- 2,645
Nope our money is not gone. The SS Administration invested the excess is US Treasury Notes. Just like China, Japan, and a whole host of other nations. Why do they all invest in the USA? Because it's the safest bet in the world. The problem is the BB generation's retirement bubble is too large for the tax base to compensate for. Adjustments will be necessary.
So you seem to think the money from your Social Security taxes were put aside for you to pay you when you reach the age to collect SS..... Boy, do I have a bridge to sell you!
In 2011 Obama was asked if he could guarantee Social Security Checks would go out despite the govt shutdown. He answered by saying:
“I cannot guarantee that those checks [he included veterans and the disabled, in addition to Social Security] go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.”
Why the hell NOT?
"And Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner echoed the president on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday implying that if a budget deal isn’t reached by August 2, seniors might not get their Social Security checks.
Well, either Obama and Geithner are lying to us now, or they and all defenders of the Social Security status quo have been lying to us for decades. It must be one or the other."
The article goes on to explain:
"The pretense is that a flush trust fund will pay retirees for the next 26 years. Lovely, except for one thing: The Social Security trust fund is a fiction. … In other words, the Social Security trust fund contains—nothing.”
Social Security status-quo defenders have assured us for the past 25 years that Social Security is fully funded—for the next 25 years, or 2036. So if there are real assets in the Social Security Trust Fund—$2.6 trillion allegedly—then how could failure to reach a debt-ceiling agreement possibly threaten seniors’ Social Security checks?
The answer is that the federal government has borrowed all of that trust fund money and spent it
the only way the trust fund can get some cash to pay Social Security benefits is if the federal government draws it from general revenues or borrows the money—which, of course, it can’t do because of the debt ceiling.
Thus, the answer to my initial question is that the president is telling the truth now in the sense that he is conceding there’s no money in the trust fund to pay benefits; but he and other Social Security status-quo defenders have been deceiving the public for decades.
Anytime someone has proposed personal Social Security retirement accounts as a way to ensure that people have real assets in their own account without bankrupting the government or future generations, defenders of the status quo would pounce, calling such a reform, in Al Gore’s words, a “risky scheme.” They have vociferously claimed that those trust fund assets are real and that only by having the government manage and control the accounts would seniors be guaranteed to get their retirement checks.
Well, we have the status quo and seniors may not get their checks. Had we shifted to a system of pre-funded, personal Social Security retirement accounts years ago, this wouldn’t even be an issue—because retirees would have their own money in their own accounts.
Yes, the accounts likely would have declined when the stock market went down, though not if the reform were structured like three Texas counties did 30 years ago (see here). But in case you haven’t noticed, Social Security revenues also declined during the economic downturn—because fewer people were working—so that the government is paying out more in benefits than it is taking in, and hence needing additional federal revenues, a fact admitted by Lew.
"If the budget crisis has done nothing else, it has exposed the decades-long lie about the solvency of the Social Security trust fund. The trust fund may be backed by the “full faith and credit of the federal government,” as defenders constantly remind us, but if it had real assets the president wouldn’t be talking about seniors missing their checks."
What Happened to the $2.6 Trillion Social Security Trust Fund?
YOUR MONEY IS GONE. IT HAS BEEN SPENT!
.