Borrowing from the SS accounts has been going on since LBJ.
Bush is certainly not the first to do so.
Unfortunately its SOP for the government now.
I’ve read that now because so much of the budget goes to entitlement programs (like SS) and interest on the debt. There is very little discretionary funds available for the government to use to pay for an unforeseen (unplanned) for policy “event”. (Like Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) Borrowing from the SS (and others) is its only recourse.
Actually from the beginning the social security law mandated that any additional funds collected through the social security tax had to go into the general fund and the social security trust fund was then given a special treasury bond.
Yes. It was LBJ who moved the SS money into the General Fund. If they would just give me back all the money that I paid in over 50 years, I wouldn’t ask for any more. But they won’t do that.
Iraq wasn’t an “unforseen” event. It was an unnecessary war that wasted $3 trillion of our tax money - a lot of it borrowed from Social Security