"It is covered by the trust fund on a current basis, for the most part."
For the most part? That is somewhere between Obama-esque and Clinton-esque. Well "for the most part" we are going to have to cut entitlements, i.e. SS and Medicare, in addition to defense to balance the budget. Don't think so? Go to this link, $0 Deficit Funding Levels, and tell me what YOU would do. If you refuse to look at the actual facts then that tells anyone who would like to know the seriousness of what you are arguing.
"The best thing for them to do about medicare and social security is tell the Dems, “You created these programs. You broke them. Now you’ve gotta fix them.”"
You could not be more wrong. We are not victims and our future does not depend on someone else. It's this particular kind of finger pointing that got us into this mess. It's time for those who would stand up and do what needs to be done to stand up and do it.
If we truly believe what we write on this site then WE are the ones who need to do it.
I agree that there is no “trust fund”. All revenue goes into the general fund and is spent - and then some. The so called “trust fund” is a fiction - just a bunch of IOUs in the form of Gov’t debt. The Gov’t should be honest and do away with it altogether.
We need to make deep across-the-board cuts to spending now and use any surplus to pay down the debt.
Look it up. The social security deficit for 2010 was $41 billion, and it was expected to move back into a surplus for 2011, at least until they cut the payroll tax.
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/index.html
The link doesn’t talk about the medicare deficit, but I seem to recall reading elsewhere that it was $85 billion for 2010. That was before Obama cut Medicare Advantage. It was also based upon depressed payroll tax revenues for 2010. On the other hand, costs are increasing and more people are eligible, so if you assume that it evens out at $85 billion for 2011, that leaves you at $126 billion, which is quite close to what I said the surplus would be if you made all those cuts in my first post.
So I think it works. But irrespective, they won’t get away with cutting social security and medicare, so they are just going to have to deal with them.
How old are you? Young enough that you don’t really remember what has happened to the GOP every time they tried to fix social security and medicare? They can’t do it. The Dems just demagogue it and make it stick. Until the people demand that these benefits be cut, it is not going to happen. If the GOP takes the leadership on this issue without a mandate to cut, then they are just working themselves out of a job, and the problem will not be fixed anyway.
The truth of the matter is that these programs cannot truly be fixed. They can be cut. They can’t be fixed. Privatization won’t fix these programs, despite what the GOP leaders think. When the trust funds are not running a surplus, every dollar that you privatize means the trust fund is running a bigger deficit which will need to be covered by the general budget on a yearly basis, thereby increasing the federal debt. So if you try to privatize any portion of it, you are just increasing the national debt by a like amount. Privatization might have worked back in the 90’s when social security and medicare were running sizable surpluses, because then there was a surplus that you could privatize without increasing the deficit or cutting benefits. But we’re past that stage, and the only “solution” if you want to call it that at this point is to cut benefits, which ain’t gonna happen, at least in 2011 and 2012.