There is no "Trust fund" for Social Security or Medicare. Let me try to personalize this for you.
ngat wrote:
The two most popular are SS retirement benefits and medicare. They are still in the black and have special taxes that do go directly to a trust fund for payout.
Imagine that your only retirement plan is a cookie jar in your home. Every payday, you put $250 in the cookie jar. And the following Friday night, you take out a piece of paper and write "IOU $250" on it, put it in the cookie jar and take the $250 out and spend it on beer, cigars and other entertainment. You do this every payday for 20 years. At the end of the 20 years, all that you have in the cookie jar is IOU's from yourself.
How much value are the "assets" in your retirement cookie jar at that point?
The "Social Security Trust Fund" contains a bunch of "intragovernmental bonds." These are just IOU's from one government agency to another. The money has all been spent on farm subsidies, food stamps, welfare, cash for clunkers and treadmills for shrimp. The actual money is gone.
And the only way that the government agencies that borrowed from the "Trust fund" can pay it back is by cutting their own spending so they can pay back the "bonds," or by taxing more to pay back the "bonds." Or the Congress could avoid responsibility by "restructuring" the benefits.
Oh, or the Federal Reserve could just print enough money to paper it over. Benefits could be paid at current levels, but with money that is worth much less and won't have the buying power to live on due to the inflation.
Love your SS for Dummies explanation on comment #16. I just posted it on my FB because I have a few “friends” that just don’t quite get that we are broke. Thanks. Great job.
2Corinthians:11:19:
For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye, yourselves, are wise.
I recall recent testimony from a Medicare trustee. It will actually default and end in 1223 because it is exclusively funded by its Trust Fund and that fund will be empty. The law does not allow borrowing money from elsewhere.
Dems want to tie retirees to a locked in failure.
Because SS is a ponzie scheme it will just pull from general revenue and increase debt.
I recall recent testimony from a Medicare trustee. It will actually default and end in 1223 because it is exclusively funded by its Trust Fund and that fund will be empty. The law does not allow borrowing money from elsewhere.
Dems want to tie retirees to a locked in failure.
Because SS is a ponzie scheme it will just pull from general revenue and increase debt.