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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zzpat who wrote (33604)	9/8/2017 11:07:54 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 363101

You may recall that Democrats wanted a "lockbox" for Social Security so that money couldn't be spent on wars or tax cuts. By law the SS surplus (when it had a surplus) has to be invested in treasury securities. Given that context the "lockbox" ideas doesn't make a lot of sense. Money will (to the extent the program is running a current accounting surplus) flow out of the lock box. You could attempt to implement some weird stipulation that the money from the "lock box" can't be used for certain purposes but 1 - Money is fungible. The money from income taxes was more than enough for the war. As for tax cuts that isn't even spending that gets covered, its just something that (not always but often) gives you less money to cover other things. 2 - If you can pass such a stipulation, you could also just directly defund wars, or vote against tax cuts. Any "lockbox" law wouldn't be a constitutional requirement it would be an ordinary law like any budget law or tax cut law and it could be overturned in the process of passing a budget (or supplementary spending bill for a war) or tax law. Passing such a lockbox law would not bind any future combination of president and congress that wanted to have a tax cut or fund a war, it wouldn't only be binding (unable to be overturned) on politicians that wouldn't have voted for the things it wants stopped anyway. Basically it was a rhetorical/political construct of very little real meaning, and would still be so even if it had been passed in to law. That is unless it was passed as a constitutional amendment, but that was never going to happen, isn't the type of thing that should happen, and still probably could be gotten around (see point 1 above) if it did happen. As for getting rid of the Republican party - One party states have a more negative track record than ones where actual political competition is possible. In any case if we had to get rid of one party a better choice would be the Democrats. Then we could finally have a shot at entitlement reform. Only a shot because the Republicans are quite capable of not getting their act together, but there would be a chance. Of course really if either major party disbanded, the ideas and interests it represents would just fall under a new party. Short term the party that remains might win all over the place but that wouldn't last. Taxpayers can't subsidize them forever. They aren't. A Walmart job reduces the amount of welfare payments someone receives. Sometimes to zero, sometimes not, but either way the government gets to pay out less.