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

To: neolib who wrote (217016)	2/3/2005 8:03:06 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1573924

My argument is that the government debt is independent of the SS income. It is dependent on all of government income and all of the outflow. I think it makes sense to consider the federal government as one entity for your bottom line budget figures, and then include unfunded liabilities in those figures not just offical debt. You can also consider the parts of the government and different funds and how they operate in fact it is probably important to do so, but the government's overall financial state is more important than how different government funds relate to eachother. You are correct that private social security accounts do not make the unfunded liability go away. If the benefits paid go down in proportion to the amount that is contributed to the private accounts than they do help control future growth in unfunded liabilities but the amount going to current retirees will still have to be paid + there will be some liability to people my age and younger even if we do contribute to personal accounts because not all of the money will go in to these accounts and we are supposed to recieve (smaller) social security checks in addition to the return on the private accounts. Here is an interesting perspective on the "trust fund" that points out the problem with considering social security in isolation from the rest of the government. Assuring the Solvency of Social Security for Free catallarchy.net