"That's as good as money sir, those are IOUs."
I salute you for fighting the good fight here and pointing out the truth. From experience, I know it won’t get you any love here. People prefer to find some excuse as to why their socialism isn’t really socialism.
To provide more data I did look into the budget a bit closer.
Social Security + Medicare is $1.29 Trillion in the FY2012 budget. The taxes which people pay to cover those programs come to $862 billion. Of the two, Medicare is ridiculously short. It pays out $468 billion on taxes which amount to $202 billion. Social Security is not nearly as bad, though it is certainly already in arrears. It pays out $761 billion while bringing in $660 billion in taxes.
This does not include either medicaid, or the disabled portion of social security. This is just the stuff for retirees.
This is out of $3.73 Trillion, so those two programs are around a third, and projected to grow each and every year for the foreseeable future.
Security costs (defense +FBI, DHS, CIA, etc) comes to $881 billion.
non discretionary spending+medicaid (which appears to group in everything one might consider welfare- food stamps, unemployment, child nutrition, disability payments) comes to $767 billion.
Discretionary non defense spending is $462 billion.
Oh, and to keep it in perspective, as we always hear the nonsense about cutting foreign aid, the budget for that is a whopping $56 billion. While in the lives of normal people that sounds like a lot it is well under 2% of the federal budget.
So, just to put some numbers out there, the biggest spending by the federal government is payments to retirees. It is also growing fast. The budget projections show those two items going up by more than 50% in eight years. Of course those are Obama projections, which are likely to be patently false (as in underestimates).
While people will whine and gnash their teeth when some politician is honest enough to point out the truth, it still remains the truth. Sadly though, they are likely right that the truth will cost people elections.
Though how about a simple analogy? If hired a financial planner who you knew was writing you IOUs over the years as your retirement account, without any actual backing in capital or securities, wouldn’t you get a bit leery and provide a bit more somewhere else? This is especially the case if that financial planner lived high on the hog, and always seemed to be in debt. Yes, I know Social Security is a mandated financial planner, but nonetheless the signs of fiscal doom have always been there.
Hell no! I would fire him and take him to court for fraud. What kind of dummy would keep paying a financial planner who did that and go pay someone else to try to cover for it with yet another plan?
"That's as good as money sir, those are IOUs."