| In fact the SS fund was being raided in 1943. Instead of combining the funds, which is what happened under Johnson, they would put the SS money in the "Trust Fund" and then promptly "borrow" all that wasn't needed to pay current retirees back out again.
We all need to think really hard about where we would be as a country today if the government owned all the corporations. Does anybody see an Apple or a Microsoft in there? How about Google? Wait, there's more. Once the government started unloading its stocks because the benefits going out had started exceeding the money coming in (which just happened last year), the stock market would tank as the single largest shareholder was known to be embarking on a long, slow, but really big selling spree. Which means that the trust fund would lose value. How much value? About the same as it's going to lose due to the Treasury reneging on the T-bills that SSA holds. The shortfall isn't about money, or what happened to it. It's about demographics: the fact that there will so few workers per retiree compared to the 1940's and 50's. |
Let's be clear that the alternative was Socialism. If the Treasury hadn't borrowed it, the money would have been invested in private enterprise via stocks and bonds. Before too many years, we would have had -- literally -- government ownership of the means of production. In fact that may have been FDR's actual intent.