>>The trust fund does not contain assets, just unfunded liabilities...<
Actually, the unfunded liability of the Social Security trust fund is completely unrelated to any of the numbers we’ve been talking about. The fund doesn’t “contain” an unfunded liability, the way it contains non-public debt issues. Rather the unfunded liability is a measure of how out of balance the future liabilities are to the long term tax revenues plus the non-public debt held, discounted back to the present day. It’s essentially an unknowable number, given the uncertainties of all the variables, but attempts are made to at least estimate it.
The unfunded liability of just Social Security is probably approaching $20 trillion by now and is totally unrelated to the non-public debt issued to the trust fund.
A distinction without a difference. The $2.6 trillion in the SSTF is included in our national debt limit. There is no money set aside to pay for those IOUs. It represents an unfunded liabilty in much the same way the publicly held debt does.
The unfunded liability of just Social Security is probably approaching $20 trillion by now and is totally unrelated to the non-public debt issued to the trust fund.
That is a projection of the additional costs of the program that are not covered by the current revenue based on projected expenditures in the future. 10,000 people a day are retiring and will continue to do so for the next 20 years. By 2030 one in five residents of this country will be 65 or older, twice what it is today. Where is the additional money going to come from under the current 6.2% payroll tax each for employer and employee? That is why the promises that have been made fall $18 trillion short of what is needed. With only two workers for every retiree in 2030, how high must the payroll taxes be to support a doubling of the number of retirees?