“The payroll tax is used to fund SS.”
It is a pay as you go scheme. If it was in a safe trust, that money would not have been included in the GF. It is called fuzzy math.
Over the years they have gutted the SS program with every feel good scheme that the politicians could think of. Not very forward looking was it?
Don’t get me wrong. Your govt owes you that money...no question about that. But, I don’t think they intend to pay it back. If they were sincere, every politician in Congress would be in SS.
If they intended to pay it back, they wouldn’t be equating SS with all the welfare programs, feel good give away schemes and trying to make SS recipients look like welfare queens. Remember...people paid into SS with their hard earned wages...no one ever said we had a choice or option.
The SSTF consists of non-market, interest bearing T-bills. They represent an obligation based on the good faith and credit of the USG to honor them, just like the publicly held debt. The problem is not the IOUs in the SSTF, but rather, the actuarial problem of promising more benefits than the system can produce in revenue. It is a Ponzi scheme where those at the top of the pyramid receive far more out of the system than they put in.
Over the years they have gutted the SS program with every feel good scheme that the politicians could think of. Not very forward looking was it?
Far from gutting it, they have been adding to the benefits without providing the revenue stream to support it. SS is on automatic pilot in terms of the COLA increases. Even though the cap on earnings has been raised almost every year and taxes have been raised 40 times, the revenue is still insufficient to cover the long term liabilities.
Don’t get me wrong. Your govt owes you that money...no question about that. But, I don’t think they intend to pay it back. If they were sincere, every politician in Congress would be in SS.
The famous 1983 Faustian bargain Reagan made with Tip O'Neill on SS mandated that all new federal employees had to join SS and that included Congress.
If they intended to pay it back, they wouldn’t be equating SS with all the welfare programs, feel good give away schemes and trying to make SS recipients look like welfare queens. Remember...people paid into SS with their hard earned wages...no one ever said we had a choice or option.
It is not a matter of paying anything back. SS is a pay as you go system. Today's workers pay for today's retirees. The $2.6 trillion in the SSTF represents the same kind of liability the USG has towards the $1.2 trillion held in T-bills by the Chinese. The only difference in the T-bills held by the SSTF is that they can only be redeemed by the USG and cannot be sold to anyone else. The $2.6 trillion is part of the national debt. So is the Medicare Trust Fund and the federal employee trust fund, etc.
SS is going broke because we have an aging society, which will cause more benefits to be paid out than the revenue we are taking in. Fewer workers to support more retirees. By law, once the SSTF IOUs are exhausted, then benefits must be reduced based on revenue. The gap between benefits promised and revenue produced is the unfunded liability of SS.