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This is what government employees, contractors, politicians, the media, etc., say to justify not cutting the hundreds of billions that go to them and programs that they like.

It also happens to be a fact. When you eliminate defense and entitlement/welfare spending (that are on automatic pilot), and debt servicing costs so called discretionary spending used to run the rest of the government is only 17% of the budget. Entitlements are the fastest growing part of the budget.

So they're held separately ? I completely agree in the technical sense. But then let's look at 2 pie charts. One for these "separate" programs, and one for everything else. The mere fact that the gubmint and other concerned institutions have now lumped all into one pie chart is the beginning of mind games that teenagers play to justify things. Obviously, it's presented as one pie chart so voila - it looks like more than half of our "spending problem" is SS/Med. The Social Security Trust Fund was created in 1939 as part of the Amendments enacted in that year. From its inception, the Trust Fund has always worked the same way. The Social Security Trust Fund has never been "put into the general fund of the government." Funny, I never saw pie charts like this until a few years ago. The argument was never made this way as long as the OASDI trust funds had annual surpluses. As the tipping point approached, gubmint started the vulcan mind-meld mental games to convince people that they had to make do with smaller SS checks and they had to work longer before starting to collect.

SS went into the red in the early 1980s, which prompted the Faustian bargain that Reagan made with Tip O'Neill in 1983 that increased the retirement age for full benefits from 65 to 67, and levied taxes on SS earnings. It also forced all new federal hires into SS. The fact is that SS is actuarily unsustainable. It is a Ponzi scheme.

Government old-age benefit programs are an inducement to not save and not invest adequately, so they are a cruel lie.

SS was never meant to be a full retirement system although one-third of the current recipients have SS as their only income. I don't view them as a lie. If people are too dumb to save and prepare themselves for retirement, the responsibility falls upon them not the government. The problem is that the very people who did not save believe that the government should provide them with a comfortable retirement. And the Dems agree with them.

Yes, that's why Congress is so focused on "fixing" them by cutting outlays. If they do that, they can stop redeeming. They can go back to spending every dollar of tax revenue and borrowing,

You really can't cut outlays because there are 10,000 people retiring every day for the next 20 years. By 2030 one in 5 will be 65 or older--twice what it is now. Right now, the objective is to change the cost trajectory so it stops going up so fast and eventually will head back down once the baby boomers go through the system. Obamacare wants to control costs thru the IPAB, Ryan wants to do it thru premium support and competition with the patient having the funding and making the decisions. There will also be some means testing in terms of how much support the government will provide.

The fact is Congress has gotten the taxpayer way in over their head financially. Congress critters have always been told by their smarter, older peers that the economy eventually picks up and grows so borrowing is acceptable.

LOL. I blame the voters. The politicians give the voters exactly what they want. You get the government you deserve. Voters will vote out of office people who tell them the truth. We have a dumbed down electorate that is ill-informed and unengaged.

The showdown between those who receive money from the government is obviously what is looming in the not-too-distant future, unless the economy takes off so much that we miraculously have $3 to $4 trillion in tax revenue floating in every year. If not, the "Greek zone" is what we're flirting with.

$3 or $4 trillion won't be enough to sustain the current programs with the same benefits. They will consume every federal dollar. They must be reformed to reduce future liability. By 2030 there will be 2 workers for every retiree. You won't be able to tax enough to cover the costs. And with a $16 trillion national debt and growing, the debt servicing costs will continue to rise. The interest rates have been held to an artificially low rate by the Fed. If they return to historic rates, we will be looking at debt servicing costs approaching a trillion dollars a year. And then we will be Greece.

I'm not talking about funding, but the purpose of the spending. What is the purpose of MC if not a benefit to MC recipients ? Otherwise it would just be a payment to the healthcare industry for no purpose.

I don't understand your point.

Ok, you said "you really can't cut outlays" then went on to describe 2 plans that are purported to "control costs"; nowhere do you mention increasing the money paid into the fund.

Bottom line, you're saying what SS and MC pays out needs to be reduced.

I'm simply saying that SS is already too small to live on - I mean really, how low would the government like to go ? I can make it actuarily very profitable easily: just make the retirement age 95. Or perhaps make the maximum monthly retirement benefit $100.

How about this: What is SS / MC ? A pile of Treasury paper asserting a claim on future tax revenue of a profligate government, and a system that withholds from every employee's paycheck and pays out benefits to retirees.

If we stopped paying ALL SS / MC payments, completely ended the programs, but left the withholding in place, the first year would produce a bit of a surplus based on current total Federal Revenue; perhaps $100 billion or so, give or take.

Guess what Congress would do then. Spend even more (issue more bonds) and rack up another trillion in annual deficit. Why would they borrow ? Because they can. And they want to keep sloshing money around to garner votes; that's the easy way to stay elected.

At this point, it's just a "clash of consituencies". Which groups will win out with > 50% of Congressional votes. HHS, FTC, HUD, Welfare, Transportation, Senior Citizens, green energy, whatever.

What's really rich is that Congress would undoubtedly have the gall to keep the withholding line on everyone's paycheck labeled SS/ MC ! Because the mass media would not do a PR campaign to gin up political opposition - no one in positions of power would care either way. Just tell everyone it's for runout costs or something.

As far as a "dumb" electorate and people who are too "dumb" to save, there is a subtle difference between blaming them and not. There is a difference between individual responsibility and societal responsibility. And nothing makes it more clear than mass marketing, i.e., the ability to sway the opinions of "the masses". This is done by leaders of society; even going back to pre-printing press times, the monarch had the machinery of government and leaders in society to spread a story. Also, those who were in powerful positions in society, if they thought it best to oppose the monarch, could try their hand at swaying public opinion with their own stories spread with their own story-spreading machinery, i.e., leaders in towns, other nobles, etc.

Of course, in our day, such machinery is more powerful than ever in history, and, as always, supports contending viewpoints in all the various types of media. The education establishment engraines things into people's minds that remain firmer than ever 70 years later. Government and big business push all sorts of ideas which are designed to separate the unsuspecting from their money.

The smoking debate is a classic case: years ago cigarettes were pushed in such a complex and powerful way that people themselves took cigarette smoking to be "their own". While we can fault the individual smoker - what if this concerted PR campaign never happened ? The cigarette marketer takes credit for boosting sales; they readily acknowledge that they had a hand in convincing millions of people to smoke.

Now, scarcely a few decades later, the PR campaign is the exact opposite. Millions of people are losing out on the pleasure of a good smoke, abandoning cigarettes, due to the efforts of the marketer.

Marketing works.

The King, the President, Congress, CEO's - all leaders of society, can lay out a vision, a plan, an idea, and get the thing put into motion with the means at their disposal. Kennedy said "man on the moon" and bingo, everyone gets behind him. Leaders in the American colonies started the American Revolution and a new nation. From the FDR libary at Marist:

"As Governor of New York State FDR enacted a law to provide old-age pensions and was ready to extend it nationally. By Executive Order, Roosevelt created the Committee on Economic Security and their recommendations provided the basis for Congress' 1935 Social Security Act."

If the "big idea" turns out to be a winner in the long run - give the leader(s) who initiated it the credit they deserve.

But if it turns out to be unworkable in the long run - do we blame all the people who... were forced by their government at the time to participate in the idea ? Every world leader who brings calamity on his nation blames the citizenry for his mistakes.

Why did everyone vote in FDR ? Hey, wait a minute. All of my grandparents voted AGAINST FDR. Everyone at the time was talking about SS; old folks started receiving benefits. My parents heard about it from the time they were small children. Look at the checks those old people get - you'll have one too. I guess as 10-year olds they should have resisted having these thoughts ingrained into their minds because it's a ponzi scheme. All the politicians, coworkers, family, newspapers, old people reliably getting their SS checks for all those decades, that "greatest generation" should have been more suspect of all those influences and assumed that they would get little or nothing out of SS. And many of them did. But, as is always the case with marketing, you don't get 100% response, but you will always get some response. There were some people who always had the idea, subconsciously if nothing else, that they had SS as a fallback, just in case. They could subsist on SS if they had to.

The sin of these types of programs is that they always induce some portion of the population to not save and invest. And leaders that know that are wrong for instituting what they know to be a bad program in order to pander for votes. And those leaders that don't know that should because they have the responsibility to as leaders.

Both bear responsibility, the government and the non-savers. The non-savers will pay a dear price for being misled into relying on the government. The government, however, can not avoid it's own share of the blame by pretending that it had nothing to do with the program, any more than Bernie Madoff can place all the blame on his investors for being so stupid. We don't absolve Bernie and blame only his investors; and we must remember that SS withholdings are confiscated by the government, while Bernie's investors made a choice to invest with his firm.

IMHO.