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

To: TimF who wrote (69633)	5/3/2018 3:35:25 PM
From: neolib	Respond to of 353643

The different treatment of money in different funds by me (I use fund X for A, fund Y for B), by government rules, by third parties etc. causes the different outcomes. Brilliant! That is the whole point. Its never "merely moving it", which is why claiming it is "merely moving it" is nuts. You have to look at the details to understand WHY its being moved around the way it is. There is some point to the exercise. SS law requires that payments be cut when the trust fund runs out if current SS tax revenue doesn't cover current payments for the year. Which is why the General Fund paying back the SS Trust Fund with interest is important. There are plenty of things you could point out that are valid to discuss about the Gov borrowing from the SS Trust Fund, for example, being such a tempting candy jar it has likely contributed to poor Congressional fiscal restraint. Or you could argue that despite the SS law you note above claiming that benefits must be cut if the well runs dry, that you think the General Fund will in fact backstop it (thus making SS a true political entitlement program) and that is the reason you don't really think that SS is independent of general taxation. Those might all be true. But its not how the law reads or how the accounting is done.

To: TimF who wrote (69633)	5/3/2018 8:38:31 PM
From: i-node	Respond to of 353643

>> But moving the money around does produce different results because SS law requires that payments be cut when the trust fund runs out if current SS tax revenue doesn't cover current payments for the year. That's not insignificant, its estimated to be a cut of a bit less than a quarter all at once. And that is scheduled to happen in just over ten years. People are starting to take notice. Most still assume that government will just "take care of it" but over time, it will become apparent that it is a big problem. The real probably is that Medicare will run out at roughly the same time or earlier, and no one knows where that money coming from, either. Medicaid is already pitiful. (I just did some work for a GI doc in California who did mostly Medi-Cal, and damn if he wasn't being paid less than Arkansas GI docs for a lot of procedures!) Perfect storm.