If Lew was speaking from the point of view of the Treasury, he would be wanting to preserve the so-called “credit rating” of the US government.
If that was his intention, he would only be advocating for lower government spending, since that would be all that a real “banker” would want to see since the debt pile is so high. A real bank would not be lending more when so much is owed relative to annual revenue without a plan to reduce spending.
Social Security and Medicare are the only areas that politicians want to cut, since that is cash going back to the sheeple, not to Federal vendors, contracting companies and employees.
Social Security and Medicare, however, were set up as separate trust funds with separate payroll deductions.
But we can all see now how the utterly corrupt and morally bankrupt financial elites and their servants, Congress, seek to lump those trust fund withholdings in with Federal income tax withholdings in the minds of the sheeple.
“Social Security and Medicare, however, were set up as separate trust funds”
sorry my friend, but that is simply not the reality. the so-called “trust funds” are a fiction. the only “assets” in the funds are IOUs from the Treasury, a promise from the State to pay itself. these are pay-as-you-go programs (with your taxes paying the benefits of current retirees, and you dependent on future taxpayers for your benefits) and can be cut at will by washington
Bush proposed personal accounts, which would be your own property, but the idea went no where