I detect a little bit of cynicism.... you don't think the government would cancel all the debt it owes itself? It would only wipe out about 45% of the debt.?
So I wonder. The gov (fed) owes itself (ss) this debt. How much of the national debt would go away if ss forgave the fed?
It looks like the SS "Trust" Fund is about $2.2 trillion.
And total intragovernmental debt is $4.305 trillion. The current debt held by the public is $6.955 trillion.
Using the creative accounting used by Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and now Obama, the increase in intragovernmental debt each year didn’t count towards the budget deficit that they reported. So they were able to claim much smaller deficits than what they were truly running, all to have the bill fall on someone later, or to push off the responsibility of actually fixing anything.
And fixing these programs would have taken very small changes at one point...
In 1940, if you lived to age 65, you had a life expectancy of about 13.7 more years.
Today, that figure stands at about 17.38 years.
In the meantime, retirment age has gone from 65 to 66 for the population eligible for full benefits.
If you increased retirement age by 3 years so that you had approximately the same number of years of benefits in retirement as when the program started, then you would have solved 100% of the funding problem, according to the American Academy of Actuaries. And that’s with increasing the age to 70 steadily, finally hitting 70 in the year 2030 - not even an instant jump.
That’s a fair solution - gradual increases to minimize hits to those right at retirement age but not putting an enormous burden on future generations while only benefitting the elderly.
But that’s too easy, and no politician, Repub or Dem, has had the guts to actually solve SS... Bush’s “solution” didn’t close squat of the funding gap.
That debt is meaningless. It wont be “paid.” Soon enough we will have no choice.
I detect a little bit of cynicism.... you don't think the government would cancel all the debt it owes itself? It would only wipe out about 45% of the debt.?