When the Social Security Administration gave all this excess revenue to the Treasury to spend for all those years, "Special-issue Treasury bonds" took that excess revenue's place in the convenient bookkeeping anomaly that we know as Social Security's "Trust fund."
In 2017, according to the Social Security Administration's website, benefits were financed by $873 billion in payroll taxes, and $85 billion in "Interest" paid by the Treasury.
There is a $2.9 trillion trust fund "Balance" which is owed by the Treasury to the Social Security trust fund - but where will the Treasury come up with all that money? The most brilliant accountant in the world could not explain how a Treasury which has no money beyond its receipts can pay back the principal and interest owed to the Social Security trust fund without either serious budgetary course-correction or taking on new taxpayer debt.
Social Security is funded by taxpayers, and the program is rapidly depleting its "Trust fund" that is supplied its value only via new Treasury debt, the issuance of which also requires that taxpayers be the creditors on the new debt.
In a more factual account of our immediate circumstances, as the Social Security Trustees Report from June of 2018 explicitly shows, for the first time since 1982, Social Security's expenditures outpaced both the "Earmarked" payroll tax revenue and the "Interest" earned by the trust fund back in 2017.
Congress does pay into Social Security, but the prospect of Social Security falling into a looming 75-year deficit doesn't worry them, with their ample Congressional pensions, to the same extent that millions upon millions of Americans in the private sector might worry about it.
I'm not certain that we needed any further evidence that the government will try to solve Social Security as if it were just another redistributive social welfare program, but in case we did, Carrol provides it.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/yes_social_security_is_a_sinking_ship.html
In 2017, according to the Social Security Administration's website, benefits were financed by $873 billion in payroll taxes, and $85 billion in "Interest" paid by the Treasury.
There is a $2.9 trillion trust fund "Balance" which is owed by the Treasury to the Social Security trust fund - but where will the Treasury come up with all that money? The most brilliant accountant in the world could not explain how a Treasury which has no money beyond its receipts can pay back the principal and interest owed to the Social Security trust fund without either serious budgetary course-correction or taking on new taxpayer debt.
Social Security is funded by taxpayers, and the program is rapidly depleting its "Trust fund" that is supplied its value only via new Treasury debt, the issuance of which also requires that taxpayers be the creditors on the new debt.
In a more factual account of our immediate circumstances, as the Social Security Trustees Report from June of 2018 explicitly shows, for the first time since 1982, Social Security's expenditures outpaced both the "Earmarked" payroll tax revenue and the "Interest" earned by the trust fund back in 2017.
Congress does pay into Social Security, but the prospect of Social Security falling into a looming 75-year deficit doesn't worry them, with their ample Congressional pensions, to the same extent that millions upon millions of Americans in the private sector might worry about it.
I'm not certain that we needed any further evidence that the government will try to solve Social Security as if it were just another redistributive social welfare program, but in case we did, Carrol provides it.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/yes_social_security_is_a_sinking_ship.html
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