What really happened to the Social Security “Trust Fund”? The key words in the answer are Trust Fund.
Establishing the social security resources as a trust fund allowed our government to use that tax known by all who earn a paycheck as FICA.
In fact making it a trust fund required our government to “invest” the social security funds.
http://www.ssa.gov/pressoffice/factsheets/WhatAreTheTrust.htm
And invest they did. Our representatives have used social security as a blank check for so long they have created the current debt for which they want to blame Barak Obama.
It is a fact that the solvency of the social security trust fund diminished and then disappeared.
The short answer is that money was sold in the form of treasury bonds, meaning the government used it to borrow money which paid out to investors more than the government collected in revenues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Trust_Fund
Now if someone “borrowed” money from you, got in a poker game and lost it, you would say he owed you that money right?
Well guess what? Our government borrowed our money, gambled and lost it, and now they say we owe that money to our government. Isn’t that stealing?
You got that right! Great post! Keep up the good work!
ReplyDeleteDidn't they simply loan a lot of it out to other departments of the government itself, by way of the treasury bonds? How many of those "investors" you speak of were just other areas of government taking loans off of our social security fund, making riskier "investments" with it by using it to pay for things that obviously wouldn't have a net gain?
ReplyDeleteOn the contrary, you make it sound as if they invested it into the stock market or loaned it to private individuals, when my understanding has been that the government itself is playing a big shell game with our money, having us pay even more into it each time a shell comes up empty.