I’ve heard social security has “unfunded liabilities”, which are not included in the official $22 trillion national debt.
I heard that since the unfunded liabilities are projections going forward for decades, that for this reason we don’t know how much they are. So today’s politicians take the don’t ask, don’t tell approach; they don’t want to know whY those future liabilities are. And in any case , today’s politicians know they will be out of office at some point, and someone else will have to deal with it.
Social Security is the source of Clinton’s “balanced” budgets. SS revenue had not been counted as revenue before that. SS was still taking in more than it disbursed. Now we don’t even maintain the fiction that SS is an untouchable fund.