If the Social Security surplus had not been spent ??

[kentuck]

Unfortunately, most of it spent under Republican presidents. If it had not been spent, would Bush be able to say Social Security is in trouble today? If not, then isn't the problem with spending Social Security fund - rather than attempting to save it?

Or would they have put Social Security on the chopping block anyway, because they would have borrowed the money elsewhere, instead of from the SS fund, and would still have a problem meeting their fiscal responsibilities? So the problem, on closer examination, is not with Social Security, it is with the spendthrift ways of this Administration.

[fasttense]

1. If we had a balanced budget, no one would be worried about SS. n/t

[GOPBasher]

10. Exactly! If we were running surpluses and paying back the debt,

we wouldn't be worrying about SS. It would take care of itself, because the treasury would be able to pay back what it owes to the SS trust fund.

[Al-CIAda]

2. Why aren't out 'leaders' pointing out that Bu$hco STOLE the money

and now doesn't want to pay it back.

[endarkenment]

3. There isn't much wrong with spending the surplus.

What is wrong is what it is being spent on: subsidizing otherwise unsustainable tax cuts for the very wealthy. The right approach was the fiscally prudent course the federal government was on back in 2000, when we were running small surplusses and were actually in a position to pay down some of the debt, using the surplus.

The problem is what happens in 2018 when there is no surplus, when the SS t-bills come due and have to be used to sustain SS benefits. Under the bush plan the government is going to have no choice other than to raise taxes AND cut benefits, as we will have done nothing to prepare except have a billionaire party for a decade on the surplus.

Under the Clinton plan the fed would have been in good shape to incur small additional deficits to cover SS costs.

It is not too late. The obvious solution is to undo the ruinous tax cuts.

[kentuck]

4. But if they had not borrowed it from the SS fund....

they would have borrowed it somewhere else, right ? And would we not be in the same boat? Would not that money have to be paid back, no matter where it came from? And so, the problem is with borrowing too much and spending too much - not with the SS fund.

[indepat]

7. And that ain't gonna happen: of all sacrosanct RW mantras, it is # uno

[mike_c]

5. ding ding ding-- we have a winner....

That is precisely right. This is the message that needs to get out in order to counter the administration's spin on social security. The dems won't do it because they are politically complicit. The media won't do it because they're too busy rolling on their backs with their legs spread apart. This is another example of Bush's uncanny expertise at framing an issue in his own terms-- the eventual SS shortfall is the direct result of government misuse of the decades long surplus, so calling attention to that looming shortfall should shine a spotlight on the reasons the SS trust will come up short, but it doesn't. No one wants to mention the two ton elephant crapping in the living room. It just amazes me.

[smoogatz]

6. It's really about HOW it was spent

Bush's faith-based invasion of Iraq and his faith-based tax cuts for the rich (if you don't support them, then you're anti-Christian and anti-troops!). If they'd actually spent some of it improving security at ports and chem/nuke plants, I wouldn't be nearly as pissed. Bush should be impeached, frog-marched and tossed into Leavenworth.

[doodadem]

8. Tax and Spend Liberals

Why in the world are we still allowing ourselves to be pegged this way? And people BELIEVE it! My brother, a die hard Repug, is mostly a Repug because he believes that Dems will raise his taxes and take his gun.
If John Kerry really wanted to do the party some good with his leftover campaign money, if Howard Dean wanted to turn this country on it's ear, then take out a slew of TV ads showing what the Repugs have done to Tax and Spend (and it doesn't help you and me!). And like someone wonderfully suggested in another thread, do a series of spots with every day Democrats--coaching soccer, going grocery shopping, whatever--so the other half of the country can see we don't have horns like they've been told.

[Toby109]

9. Some guy kept mentioning a lock box.

That was a good idea. Wish we had elected him President. Oh wait, we did!

[slipslidingaway]

11. Good site explaining exactly what you said...

Social Security The Real Crisis

http://www.allenwsmith.com/id9.html

"We, the American people, have been played for fools and suckers by our government over the past two decades. Every president, and most members of Congress from both political parties, have knowingly and willingly participated in major fraud against the American public for partisan political reasons. The large Social Security surpluses generated by the 1983 tax increase allowed politicians to spend massive amounts of additional money without having to suffer the consequences of raising taxes. The true size of the federal budget deficit has been masked in an effort to fool the public. For example, the true size of the 2004 on-budget deficit (excluding Social Security) is reported by the OMB as $639 billion. The Social Security surplus for 2004 is $164 billion. By subtracting the Social Security surplus from the on-budget deficit (a practice that is prohibited by the 1990 Budget Enforcement Act) they arrive at a deficit number of $475 billion. This is the number that is reported to the public which is $164 billion less than the real deficit.


The points that I am making are not newly recognized facts. The government has known what it was doing from the very beginning. We know this because the Congressional Record records the efforts of a few honest members of Congress who repeatedly battled against the fraudulent practices of their colleagues. Below are excerpts from a speech made on the Senate floor by South Carolina Senator Ernest “Fritz”Hollings on October 13, 1989:


“We arrive at that fanciful…projection only by indulging in enough fraud and larceny and malfeasance to land an ordinary citizen in the penitentiary. Of course, the most reprehensible fraud in this great jambalaya of frauds is the systematic and total ransacking of the Social Security trust fund in order to mask the true size of the deficit. As we all know, the Social Security payroll tax has become a money machine for the U.S. Treasury, generating fantastic revenue surpluses in excess of the costs of the Social Security program. Excess Social Security tax revenues will be $65 billion in 1990 alone—boosted by yet another rise in the Social Security tax rate, slated to kick in January 1. By 1993, the annual Social Security surplus will soar to $99 billion.


The public fully supported enactment of hefty new Social Security taxes in 1983 to ensure the retirement program’s long-term solvency and credibility. The promise was that today’s huge surpluses would be set safely aside in a trust fund to provide for baby-boomer retirees in the next century..."

Trust fund data
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4a3.html

[AirAmFan]

12. The Trust Fund HAD to be spent. That's why Greenspan set it up the way he

did, to soak up trillions of worker dollars when Reagan put him in charge of a Social Security "reform" commission.

Remember, Greenspan had been Reagan's campaign economic adviser, and had originated the Voodoo Economics plan to cut the top tax rate by 60 percent, from 70 percent to 28 percent.

The "Social Security Commission" ploy allowed Republicans to draw attention away from the then-record $200 billion deficits largesse to the wealthiest were racking up, and misdirect attention to exaggerated problems 30 to 50 years away. (Sound familiar?)

Reagan, Greenpan, and David Stockman deliberately set the Trust Fund up as a slush fund for"tax cuts" for the rich. They raised payroll tax rates 25 percent to cut the top income tax rate by 60 percent. The "Trust Fund" was a gimmick to hide what they were doing, and it WORKED! They ALWAYS intended to spend the Trust Fund: that was its purpose. The "Trust Fund" ALWAYS was just a cleverly-camouflaged source of funding for regressive economics.

Here's a passage from the 1983 Final Report of the Social Security Reform Commission that shows Greenspan knew what he was doing. Reagan appointed Alan Greenspan commission chairman. Note the candor here in revealing that Trust Fund contributions have been used to offset part of the deficit in the general budget ever since Nixon. Note also that, although a clear majority of the Greenspan Commission wanted to halt this theft and set Social Security up as an independent entity, their opinions were buried deep in the report. Guess which side of this issue Chairman Greenspan, Bob Dole, and Bill Armstrong were on?

From the last sixth of http://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/gspan5.html :

"SOCIAL SECURITY AND THE UNIFIED BUDGET

(21) A majority of the members of the National Commission recommends that the operations of the OASI, DI, HI, and SMI Trust Funds should be removed from the unified budget. Some of those who do not support this recommendation believe that the situation would be adequately handled if the operations of the Social Security program were displayed within the present unified Federal budget as a separate budget function, apart from other income security programs.Before fiscal year 1969, the operations of the Social Security trust funds were not included in the unified budget of the Federal Government... In 1974, Congress implicitly approved the use of a unified budget by including Social Security trust fund operations in the annual budget process. Thus, in years when trust-fund income exceeded outgo, the result was a decrease in any general budget deficit that otherwise would have been shown -- and vice versa.

The National Commission believes that changes in the Social Security program should be made only for programmatic reasons, and not for purposes of balancing the budget. Those who support the removal of the operations of the trust funds from the budget believe that this policy of making changes only for programmatic reasons would be more likely to be carried out if the Social Security program were not in the unified budget....

Those who oppose this recommendation believe that it is essential that the operations of the Social Security program should remain in the unified Federal budget because the program involves such a large proportion of all Federal outlays. Thus, to omit its operations would misrepresent the activities of the Federal Government and their economic impact. Furthermore, it is important to ensure that the financial condition of the Social Security program be constantly visible to the Congress and the public. Highlighting the operations of the Social Security program as a separate line function in the budget would allow its impact thereon to be seen more clearly.

SOCIAL SECURITY AS AN INDEPENDENT AGENCY

(22) The majority of the members of the National Commission believes -- as a broad, general principle -- that it would be logical to have the Social Security Administration be a separate independent agency, perhaps headed by a bi-partisan board. The National Commission recommends that a study should be made as to the feasibility of doing this.*

* See additional views of Commissioners Ball, Keys, Kirkland, Moynihan, and Pepper in Chapter 4."

[slipslidingaway]

13. Thanks for the great reply, moving from

'it was spent' to 'it was intended to be spent' makes the scam even worse. Given the tax cuts that were enacted it does makes sense, and yes it does sound familiar with what is currently happening. Not only drawing attention away from the current deficits, but using the 'surplus' for tax cuts.

Thanks again!

[AirAmFan]

14. Have you seen the new book on Greenspan by Ravi Batra,

the economist who coined the phrase "jobless recovery"? Browsing that book is what led me to look in the original 1983 Greenspan Commission report for damning evidence about how the Trust Fund was intended to be misused. I saw Batra on CNBC last week and, sure enough, the new books shelf was overflowing with his work at my local Barnes and Noble. The book is called, "Greenspan's Fraud: How Two Decades of His Policies Have Undermined the Global Economy". The publisher's webpage is at http://www.palgrave-usa.com/Catalog/product.aspx?isbn=1403968594 . I started a DU thread on it a few days ago, at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1770193 .

[slipslidingaway]

17. No, I have seen the book and will look at the

links you posted, moving from the 'let it happen' to the 'made it happen' idea should not be dismissed in my opinion.

Many times it is easier to try and place the blame on a party instead of on a particular group of people. Without having read further I suppose one could say the Republicans made it happen and the Democrats let it happen, and there are very few people actually fighting for the working class citizen.

I would be curious to find out who supported or opposed Hollings back in 1989 and whether or not they are still in the Senate. Part of what he said and entire speech is at the link, here we are 16 years later reading his truthful words.

http://www.allenwsmith.com/id9.html

"...Mr. President, our proposed amendment, which we intend to attach to the debt-ceiling bill, would put Social Security surpluses off budget for purposes of calculating the Federal budget deficit beginning October 1, the first day of fiscal 1990. Those IOU’s are a charming bookkeeping nicety, but the sheriff who tries to collect on them is truly going to have his work cut out for him.

The hard fact is that, in the next century, the Social Security system will find itself paying out vastly more in benefits than it is taking in through payroll taxes. And the American people will wake up to the reality that those IOU’s in the trust fund vault are a 21st century version of Confederate banknotes.

Of course, the Treasury would have the option of raising taxes to repay the astronomical sums we have borrowed from the trust fund. But that would be a brazen ripoff of working Americans, many of whom will be retirees obliged to pay a second time for the benefits they have already earned.

On the other hand, if the Treasury wimps out and chooses not to raise taxes to reimburse the trust fund, then there will be no alternative but to slash Social Security benefits. The most likely scenario is that Social Security payments would be turned into just another means-tested welfare program for the very poor; if you make more than say, $15,000 per year, then forget about collecting any Social Security benefits."

[markus]

15. There Is No Social Security Crisis

Have a quick read on this:

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8976">There is No Social-Security Crisis.

Especially see this paragraph, which I think about sums it up:

The president has chosen to finance a series of tax cuts for people earning more than $100,000 a year by selling these bonds to the central banks of China and Japan, and to Social Security. Now he says that he doesn't want to pay back what he's borrowed from my generation's retirement fund. That's just wrong. Worse, what kind of message does it send to the Chinese and others that Bush plans to offer an additional $2 trillion in bonds when the U.S. government takes the position that these are just IOUs that don't need to be repaid?

[agitproperty]

16. Images from the Bush Social Security Destruction Tour...

George W. Bush (and Karl Rove) present:

Six Habits of Highly Oblivious People!

An intimate look at the Preznit's step-by-step approach to fake town hall meetings!