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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rich evans who wrote (62077)	8/23/2007 10:27:42 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 90947

I agree with your statements except that if the Government couldn't spend all taxes under the unified budget, then just maybe perceptions would cause spending to be less. But it could even if you got rid of the unified budget. Excess SS funds are required by law to be used to buy federal bonds. In other words the money is going to the federal government. Splitting the budget would make the official deficit figures higher, but other than that headline figure it would have no effect. Also splitting the budget would make the headline figure lower once the SS programs starts to draw down the "trust fund" (which is probably why at that time the "unified budget" will be modified or eliminated) Now the unfunded future liabilities are not part of the explicit federal debt statistics. But then neither is the cost of your support until you reach your life expectancy of 82 years part of your personal balance sheet. Neither is really debt or should be counted exactly the same as debt, but both should be issues that should be noted, accounted for, and faced up to. You have a problem to the extent politicians and voters don't know about, understand, and deal with the issue. I'm not sure that a higher official budget deficit, esp. with all the (accurate) claims that "nothing has really changed we are just reporting things differently", would really cause everyone to face up to the issue. I suppose it might have a small positive effect along those lines at the margin.