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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (112659)	9/11/2011 7:34:34 PM
From: tonto	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224749

Really? Can you direct us to where they had the authority to do so? Did they pick up the phone and just order transfers out of the trust fund with no one questioning them? Give us more details about how just two guys circumvented the rules.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (112659)	9/11/2011 8:16:53 PM
From: lorne	5 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224749

kenny..."Reagan and Bush used the SS trust fund to pay for their tax cuts and finance their deficits. That is really what happened.".... Ken lots of interesting stuff here..bet you already knew about all the clinton BS ...Right? ...."When it is claimed that Clinton paid down the national debt, that is patently false--as can be seen, the national debt went up every single year. What Clinton did do was pay down the public debt--notice that the claimed surplus is relatively close to the decrease in the public debt for those years".... But he paid down the public debt by borrowing far more money in the form of intragovernmental holdings (mostly Social Security) Interestingly, this most likely was not even a conscious decision by Clinton. The Social Security Administration is legally required to take all its surpluses and buy U.S. Government securities, and the U.S. Government readily sells those securities--which automatically and immediately becomes intragovernmental holdings. The economy was doing well due to the dot-com bubble and people were earning a lot of money and paying a lot into Social Security. Since Social Security had more money coming in than it had to pay in benefits to retired persons, all that extra money was immediately used to buy U.S. Government securities. The government was still running deficits, but since there was so much money coming from excess Social Security contributions there was no need to borrow more money directly from the public. As such, the public debt went down while intragovernmental holdings continued to skyrocket. The net effect was that the national debt most definitely did not get paid down because we did not have a surplus. The government just covered its deficit by borrowing money from Social Security rather than the public. The Myth of the Clinton Surplus craigsteiner.us.