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

To: Road Walker who wrote (213250)	12/15/2004 5:16:17 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1573424

He said he wasn't going to "raid the SS fund", and then he did. He lied. That would be simple and clear cut if there was an actual trust fund to raid. There is no such fund in any meaningful sense. All there is is a pile of IOUs from the government to itself. The excess funds that social security takes in that are not going to be spent right away are required by law to be invested in government securities. (Of course once that happens the money is spent, there is no massive federal government bank account where these funds accumilate and grow) If what Bush has done is "raiding the SS fund", than every president since such a "fund" started has done so, and doing so is required by law. Clinton "raided" the "fund" by your definition. Gore would have if he was elected. Kerry would start doing so in January if he had been elected. To avoid "raiding the fund" (according to the definition of that term that you are apparently using), you would either have to have to have no social security surplus, or you would have to invest the social security funds in state or local government securities, or foreign bonds, or private investments, while at the same time having the general fund borrow more. This would not only require a change in the law, it would also increase the official national debt, and unless the states issue a lot of new debt it would require the federal government to make enormous investments in the private sector and/or in other countries bonds. I'm not sure that combination would be desirable and even if it was I don't think congress would go along with it. If we ever had zero national debt, while SS is still taking in more money than it is giving out, it would be interesting because it would seem that the government could not avoid breaking the law. The excess funds would be required to be invested in non-existent government bonds. I guess in practice this is not likely to be a problem because we may never have 0 debt, and even if the problem did occur the government would be quite willing to spend more. re: If you plan on spending $50,000 on a new SUV, and then decide to also buy a VCR, its true that the VCR and the SUV together cost more then the SUV alone, but its also true that if the VCR was unaffordable it was because too much was spent on the SUV. More convoluted crap from the champion of convoluted crap. Its neither convoluted nor crap. Its simple and its a fairly accurate analogy. Your complaining about the cost of the VCR while arguing for the purchase of the SUV. Are you trying to argue that $1Trillion+ is insignificant because it is incremental? It's a huge fucking increment. A Trillions dollars is big relative to most things. Its small relative to our social security obligations. Still if the obligations where increased by a trillion dollars the plan would be a very bad idea, but it appears that the obligations might actually be reduced, and at worst will not greatly increase. You would argue for anything to support this guy that you love so much. Nonsense. In your heart, do you really support another new program that adds tons of new debt on top of the tons of debt that we are already accruing? There would be no net increase in obligation. We already owe the money because of social security. Unless you are supporting the idea of getting rid of social security or reducing the payout all of this money will have to be paid out to SS recipients. It doesn't matter much if obligations for future payouts are officially considered debt or not, either way they have to be paid. If the amount that had to be paid out would go up $1trillion, or even a significant fraction of that I would be a strong opponent of Bush's plan. I'm still not sure if I support it. I support the general idea behind the plan but I'm not sure if I support the specific details of this plan. Tim