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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (181674)	1/27/2004 2:05:03 PM
From: Alighieri	Respond to of 1576880

Yes. You are speaking about SS as something that is solvent, even alluding to GAAP in one post. This is not true by any accounting standard (other than one invented by government to fool people). One can not speak of a pyramid scheme and solvency in one sentence. SS has an unfunded liability of astronomical proportion, a bubble of claimants, a bust of contributors. It makes a normally highly desirable goal of increased longevity, improved health of the population into a mortal danger to financial stability of this country. The healthier the people are, the longer they live, the sicker SS gets. Well, you are clearly not reading my posts on the topic very carefully. My reference to GAAP was meant to characterize period accounting vs long term liabilities. At the risk of being defensive...on a period accounting basis, SS takes in more revenue that it pays out. That puts it in surplus, a fact that has been disputed on this board by a couple of folks who, unlike me, profess to understand the problem. This "surplus" condition has been so for years and will continue to be so for another 10 or so years, depending on assumptions used. Because the federal budget is "unitized" and because the SS trust fund has not been designed to hold excess funds, and, more importantly, because nearly evey administration (both rep and dem) has been running an overall fed budget deficit forever, that SS surplus has been used to purchase bonds which generate revenue for the the federal government to help cover it's overexpenditures. So the federal goverment borrows money from itself, and spends it to cover a portion of the total budget deficit it runs every year...sometimes, like this year and at least for the next ten years according to the GAO, a rather small portion... 10 years from now, the problem gets a lot worse. Social Security no longer runs a surplus....to keep paying benefits it starts having to call those worthless bonds from a issuer (itself) who basically can't pay the money back unless it raises taxes, or cuts benefits or both. Do we agree so far? Do we agree on the central point I was trying to make, which is that bush's reckless tax cuts and out of control spending make the situation considerably worse, accelerate the demise and make a solution tougher, including one that involves privatization? Do you want to add your views to this post now? Al