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Originally Posted by zerospinboson
As i understood it, that SSTF did exist, hence my use of the party line on the issue. That clarifies that, then.
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Well, there's a thing in legal theory called the "Social Security Trust Fund." So in that sense, the SSTF "exists." But its only assets are T-bills and T-notes. And those, as I noted above, are purely calls on future taxing capability of the government, and nothing more. Just IOUs.
One side effect of this is that asking "will SocSec remain solvent" just isn't a relevant question at all. The right questions to ask are these:
- When will the cash flow of the SocSec program switch from positive to negative?
- When that change happens, how will we pay the bills?
- Why have our congress-critters been extracting surplus "SocSec payments" all these years while effectively lieing about their purpose and disposition.
- With respect to the previous question, why do this with the single most regressive tax imposed by the Federal Government? Note that even the "fair tax" crowd is against regressive taxes -- everyone says that taxing the poor more than the rich is just wrong. So why have we been doing so for at least the past 30+ years?
Xenophon