But they claim that SS won’t run out of money for several more years. Yes, I know that their estimates only take into account that SS is now taking in more than it is paying out.
Frankly, I'm not even sure now that this is true, either. Too many people not working. The only thing they have going for them now is the illegals paying OASD and Medicare payments (they max out their dependent deductions to avoid income taxes).
All that will come to a screeching halt when these illegals become legal by Obama edit and all their prior contributions on fake or duplicated accounts have to be reconciled and honored.....bad times are approaching, for chure....
SS is a pay as you go program. It has been running in the red for several years now. A few years ago, the Trustees estimated that SS would go permanently in the red starting in 2017. Now, it looks like the date has been moved up. Moreover, the deal that Obama struck on extending the Bush tax cuts for two years included a reduction of 2% of the employee's share of the 6.2% contribution. The effect is that there is even less revenue going into SS to pay for benefits meaning more of the IOUs have to be cashed in to make up the shortfall.
In essence, we are borrowing more money from SS as part of a mini stimulus. The bill that authorized this one year reduction includes a clause that the money must be paid back at some future date by the General Fund to make up for the loss of revenue into the SSTF. And Obama wants to extend that benefit for another year.
If we had any clever, unbiased reporter, he or she would be asking Obama some hard questions on his statement about the SS checks not going out. He made a major mistake in mentioning it because it means that the USG must borrow money to pay SS benefits and that the SSTF is really just filled with IOUs, not real assets. It really is Pandora's Box.