$2.6 TRILLION in a SS lockbox, of nothing but IOU's.
By law, any "surplus" in SS, SS has to buy government bonds. Government bonds, to pay for things like roads, bridges, levies (Like NOLA, that were never built), fountains, government trips...
General expenses, that when normal budgeting couldn't afford, they just used the money from the bonds, to pay for the things they wanted.
Well, I'm not sure you're aware, but SS no longer has a surplus every year. With the drop in employment came a drop in SS taxes.
Soon SS will be running deficits and it'll be time to open the lock box and start pulling out and cashing in those government bonds. Bonds where the money has already been spent.
We are running $1 TRILLION a year deficits...just on our everyday spending. We are $16.7 TRILLION in debt. Where are we supposed to get more money to pay back the government bonds sitting in SS? There are approximately 311 million people in the US. There are about 155 million in the work force. If SS started running a deficit of $155 BILLION a year (Which seems like nothing when your talking $1+ TRILLION a year in general spending deficit) That would be an extra $1000 a year for EVERY WORKER to contribute just to try and keep SS afloat.
And we haven't even talked about the extra costs Obamacare is going to place on everybody.
Nobody has lamented the destructive, reckless spending of the government more than me -- I predicted we would already be in collapse, though it somehow hasn't quite happened yet.
Don't even mention the "lock box" -- there never was one, and it's naive to even assume so.
You can lecture all you want about how you don't expect SS but I hear this from people every day and every one of them will fight tooth and nail to secure "their money" they think they put into that "lock box". The fact that they even use the term "lock box" reveals their true expectations.
But as I see it the biggest problem we have in the long term is a decline in fertility. 50 million abortions and pop narcissism have put us into a position in which both political parties welcome tens of millions of illegals, because the only way to replace the workers we have is to import them from abroad. It's leading to the death or balkanization of our entire culture. It's happening in Europe right now, and it's not a pretty picture.