There is no way to fix Social Security. It will either be phased out with a private program to replace it, or it will collapse, there is no third option. The demographic trends and the laws of mathematics are immutable.
Right now everyone seems to be voting to pretend there isn’t a real problem, which just means the collapse will be put off for a little while longer and thus far more epic.
The real tragedy is that the taxes contributed to this abomination of a program fueled a Government bubble that made possible all the moronic wasteful programs you want to see cut first to ‘save’ the precious Social Security program. Oh the irony.
BTW kabar, a trust fund is not a ‘fund’ if it has no assets, and you admitted in your response to me that T-bills are not assets. I didn’t call you crazy, I was calling your statement that there is a trust fund crazy.
You are entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts. Trust funds (and the federal government actually labels them as such) do exist. There is a SS Trust Fund, an HI trust fund, a federal pension trust fund, etc. They hold non-market, interest bearing T-bills and are accounted for in our national debt as an obligation of the federal government to pay (Intragovernmental Holdings) just like the publicly held debt. The SSTF is the biggest holder of US T-bills.
Do you think the Chinese consider the $1.1 trillion it holds in US T-bills as an asset?
As far as the SS program is concerned, the T-bills in the SSTF are assets. They can be redeemed to pay benefits, which has been the case since 2010. SS is a pay as you go program and it is now in the red and will be permanently. Once the T-bills in the SSTF are exhausted, benefits must be, by law, reduced to revenue received.
Source: CBO Combined OASDI Trust Funds; January 2011 Baseline 26 Jan 2011.
Note: See Primary Surplus line (which is negative, indicating a deficit)
But as far as the USG is concerned, they are an unfunded liability, which is why they are included in the $16 trillion national debt. They are not assets in terms of the total federal budget, but rather, debt. It really isn't that difficult a concept to comprehend.