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

To: neolib who wrote (215105)	1/16/2005 1:08:40 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573852

Neolib, When SS income slips into the red, the government damn well should start repaying the SS trust fund from annual taxes. Alternatively, the government will simply convert the debt, in effect transferring the balance from one credit card to another. Which, as you can imagine, will be the politician's path of least resistance. It's a really dumb trick in accounting. If the federal government is going to lend money to itself, it better not count that money as part of the general revenues. That's as idiotic as someone getting a cash advance on his credit card and counting it as a "bonus." Like I said, the SS "trust fund" is a myth. Tenchusatsu

To: neolib who wrote (215105)	1/18/2005 11:39:49 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573852

People rant on and on about the "trust fund" being nonexistent. Fine, vote to wack the pillagers. It would have had to have existed in order to be pillaged. It never really existed. SS would be just fine if all the funds that have been collected for it were spent on it. Which would mean one of two things. Either you would have had to spend a lot more money on current payments (which would leave social security in the same mess it is in now, while making the regular budget deficit worse), or you would lower social security taxes. Lowering the taxes would have some positive effects but making the social security system more sound is not one of them. Even more astonishing, some people will actually try to claim that the government cannot hold and invest funds (in Treasuries) since this is just one branch of the government giving an IOU to another. What fools! Any loan is an IOU! The fact that the government repays those loans with tax income is completely irrelevant to who the made the loan. Taxes used to repay T-bills held by Joe 6P American, or the Bank of Japan, or the IOU's to the SS trust fund are absolutely no different from each other. So I guess if I take all the money out of my 401K to go buy a Corvette my retirement is just fine because I owe the money to myself and because this is a loan it is an asswet to my retirement account?? It is not held and invested funds. Imagine there was no "trust fund" even in theory, even as an line in social securities accounting. What would happen when social security payments rise above social security tax reciepts? The same exact thing that will happen with the so called "trust fund". Either way regular (non Social Security) taxes have to rise, and by the same amount. The net practical effect of having this so called trust fund is zero. Tim