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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (136115)	8/22/2013 10:29:31 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 149317

"All there is is $2.8 trillion of I.O.U.s from the US Treasury." Nope; they are interest bearing treasury bonds, the so called "safest investment in the world." It's exactly what I would do with part of my money every paycheck for my entire life, if SS wasn't doing it for me.Otherwise, I'd have stuck money in a coffee can, and buried it, and the dollar I saved in late '62, which would have bought me 3 gallons of gas back then, would have bought me a tad less than 1/4 gallon today. "When SS turns in an IOU to pay the deficits" Do you mean, "When they redeem a US savings bond to raise cash"? There’s an interesting argument going on today between my colleague Charles Krauthammer and OMB Director Jack Lew. Krauthammer makes a case for both the ease and necessity of Social Security reform, and in particular a case against the Treasury securities that the Social Security program invests its surplus in. “They are worthless,” Krauthammer writes. “As the OMB explained, they are nothing more than ‘claims on the Treasury.’ ” Lew fires back over at the White House blog, noting that “these Treasury bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government in the same way that all other U.S. Treasury bonds are, making them anything but ‘worthless IOUs’ as Krauthammer suggests.... That said, it’s important to take Lew’s point about Treasury securities seriously. Treasury securities are considered among the single safest investments on Earth. It’s not overstating matters to argue that much of the modern financial system rests upon the confidence investors have in them. When you hear that investors are making a “flight to safety,” it means they’re buying Treasury securities. The same Treasury securities that the Social Security system purchases. If the government defaults on those bonds, the economy will fly into a tailspin. voices.washingtonpost.com There are no problems with SS that can't be fixed by removing the earnings cap.