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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Farmboy who wrote (13203)	3/20/2012 11:01:46 PM
From: Bearcatbob	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 85487

LOL - It should have been retained somewhere to use to pay to those who were paying it in, don't you agree? Where? Where is the issue. The scandal is the budget idiocy that makes Treasuries a fiat investment.

To: Farmboy who wrote (13203)	3/21/2012 12:10:31 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 85487

but I do believe it was illegal to use SS funds for any other reason, until a democrat controlled congress approved a bill that allowed such 'withdrawls' It wasn't illegal. In fact it was (and still is) legally mandatory to put the money in to treasury debt, which automatically makes the money available for spending on other things. What I did change is the headline figure given out as the deficit. It used to be the balance without the SS taxing or spending considered (which why the SS tax is bringing in more than SS spending gives you a higher figure for the deficit). Then it was changed to include all income and all outgo. Before this excess money from the SS tax was still spent on other things but there wasn't as much excess money (until the later changes in the early 80s see en.wikipedia.org ), and also while the money was spent on other things it was counted in the headline budget balance figure as part of the deficit, rather than as spending covered by taxes (even though it was covered by SS taxes) I think the later method makes more sense, but it was changed to make the deficit look smaller not because of some quest for technical accuracy. And while the later/current method is more technically accurate in measuring the actual budget balance, the older method was at least a crude attempt to consider future liabilities, which the current account ignores. Ideally I'd like something like the current "unified budget" method, combined with a clear and heavily publicized accounting of accrued future liabilities. Well in one sense the future SS spending isn't a future liability. It isn't debt or a contractual obligation. Congress could cancel Social Security next month and it wouldn't be a default, but that simply isn't going to happen, at most reforms will slightly reduce the cost, and if that happened you could just update the future liability line in the government's accounts. Its possible that now that the SS system pays out more than the SS tax brings in that it will be changed back, because now the old method would make the deficit look smaller. See en.wikipedia.org