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Sunday, July 10, 2011

Question Of The Day
Posted by Jill | 7:55 AM
How can Social Security be a contributor to the deficit when it is a holder of some of that debt in the form of Treasury bonds? To say that we have to cut Social Security to reduce the deficit is like saying we have to nuke China to reduce it.

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5 Comments:
Blogger rjs said...
the social security trust fund is separate from the general fund, invested in treasuries, & fully funded until 2037...so why are all the defict cutting attacks being leveled at social security? well, the trust fund is made up of Treasury securities, which are promises to pay money that the government has already borrowed & spent for other purposes back to the trust fund...so that money will now have to be repaid, plus interest, by future taxpayers to the social security trust fund...so those who want to cut social security or otherwise eviscerate that part of the safety net want to do so in order to permit the government to avoid paying back that debt, and thereby not have to raise taxes to do it...
7/10/11, 9:04 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
I'd say it's even simpler than that. If an entity that "owns" 1 trillion of the US debt -- not quite accurate in the case of SS, but let's just say it is -- went away, like was closed with no hope of even trying to collect the debt, some would say that the debt went down by 1 trillion.
So if the ss trust fund went away so that it would never make a claim on the treasury for the billions it's owed......
7/10/11, 7:48 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Don't forget the 13% FICA tax being used to pay for Afghanistan rather than seniors' retirements !
7/11/11, 11:29 AM  
Anonymous xulon said...
The usual tactic is "privatizing" SS, what W said his inability to pull off was his only regret of his presidency. You promise people "their" money, the stock market goes WAY up, grandma buys stock with "her" money, the bubble bursts and 40% of grandma's money is now in some billionaire's brokerage account and grandma's stock broker is telling a weeping grandma that stock is a long-term thing so don't touch your money for the next forty years until it recovers from that bubble burst.

Now the plan is to give the billionaires tax breaks, default on the debt which SS holds (and pretend China is the REAL target) and the same thing is accomplished, SS is destroyed.
7/11/11, 2:32 PM  
Blogger Pangolin said...
Washington D.C., it's corporate masters and the propaganda factories have defaulted on the concept that U.S. law has even a pretense of meaning what the laws actually say.

Ronald Reagan raised Social Security taxes to finance his tax cuts on the wealthy and the great wad of Pentagon spending that handed loot to his wealthy cronies. It was supposed to "save" Social Security.

Clinton made a valid attempt to balance the US Federal budget at the expense of doing little or nothing for the actual people.

Bush just looted.

Obama is telling us that the platter of bones picked clean of all meat is a freshly roasted turkey.

Nobody believes their bullshit anymore; not even the people paid to pretend they believe it.
7/12/11, 4:50 AM  
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