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

To: bentway who wrote (357707)	11/9/2007 12:07:51 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573922

it would have been political suicide for pols to spend the SS surplus as general revenue Its pretty much imposable to do otherwise as long as you have a social security surplus and a general government deficit. By law social security surpluses have to be invested in government bonds. So "spending the SS surplus as general revenue" just means the same thing as "having a general revenue deficit" when you have a social security surplus. Maybe your a deficit hawk and don't like having any treasury deficit. If so you must have been unhappy your whole life, or at least most of it, depending on how old you are. Its business as usual, because it isn't just something thats been done recently, its something that has been done constantly for my whole lifetime. The only real way to avoid it if you have even a penny of treasury deficit is to the surplus money and invest it in something other than federal government debt (after first changing the law to allow such investment). If you get a strong return (noticeably more than what the government has to pay on its debt) on that investment then things might be ok. If you don't than your not really solving any problem. You have a real trust fund rather than the nominal trust fund you have now, but you also have a lot more ordinary government debt. You really should think of the federal government as one entity. You can make changes that can financially help out one part of it but if they cost another part just as much you don't have any real gain. If your sanguine about the current situation than at least you can say we aren't in trouble, but the changes haven't really helped either. If you think where heading for disaster than (unless you invest it elsewhere and can get a great return off of an investment of trillions) your just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Take your pick, but either way realize that just shifting money between different federal departments and agencies doesn't create wealth to pay to retirees. (OTOH it doesn't destroy it either, at least not more than a very tiny percent in overhead)