| Actually, I saw nothing in what you have cited contradicting the report I cited, just slightly different estimates and slants on the matter. The point of the commission is that the Trust Fund is irrelevant, the problem is the pressure put on the general budget to sustain Social Security obligations. In other words, yes, the Trust Fund will be exhausted under current assumptions by about 2040, but so what? If we go on paying out, it will not matter that we ever had the fiction of a Trust Fund. The underlying problem is the failure to make real investments, instead insisting on buying essentially meaningless notes from the Treasury. This has nothing to do with "appropriation", it has to do with a bogus pension program, one that has long been, in effect, a pyramid scheme. As for your other query, it is my understanding that the big problem is the ever- growing nature of the obligations, not the fictive debt held in the "trust fund", but the actual costs of maintaining the system towards the middle of the century...... |
