I recall when SS was supposed to run out in 2017.
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“That’s not the way it works. That’s not the way any of this works.”
First: No rational person believes the US would invest in everything but Social Security until then.
Second: Sovereign states, central banks, and national economies are a thing.
“Accounting” is just like a soccer game: everyone agrees to pretend an imaginary score exists, even though it’s purely conceptual and – literally – an article of faith, subject to change by the judgement and intervention of authorities.
Money is nothing but an idea, tangibly fetishized by slips of green paper and metal disks. Increasingly, it’s not even that, but mere magnetic blips on a global network. (Individuals and governments create “money” all the time; the former through contracts, in the form of debt; the latter by printing presses or computers, in the form of physical or digital currency.)
The idea that any US government account would ever go “insolvent” – let alone Social Security – is madness, and assumes that money, debt, and accounting are some imposed reality like particle physics, rather than a social construct.
Other than a deliberate perpetuation by those who benefit from it, I’ve never understood why “money” is so difficult for people to understand. It shouldn’t be.
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Excuse me. It’s more like American football. Especially the fiascos of last weekend, with the refs determining outcomes of games by disallowing perfectly good touchdowns over extremely questionable calls.
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You’re right it’s not the horse it’s the rider.
Not only is the optics bad but so is the horsemanship.
Dudes (and I mean that as “not real cowboys”)
Need to take crowd control lessons from the mounted NOLA cops at Mardi Gras. They difuse situations peacefully. These bozos on horseback are only exacerbating the problem.
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No, not really.
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Mouse clicks?
Or informing the Public?
Thanks to you for doing the latter
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That seems to be the intent. LEOs across the country seem to lean into escalating volatile situations rather than defusing them. The days of de-escalation seem to be long gone.
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The word I used was “disguise.” The massive surpluses were counted in the plus column when figuring the budget deficits (for public consumption) so they wouldn’t look so bad. The amount of money in the “trust fund” will indeed run out at some point but it will have done what it was supposed to do - pre-paid a huge portion of the Boomers’ SS payouts. Since SS was designed to be pay-as-you-go, there should be no question about making adjustments to keep payments flowing. This idea that the Boomers and only the Boomers must entirely self-pay is a really convenient excuse for throwing them under the bus rather than paying up as they and several other generations have done over the last 80 years or so.
ETA No one expected our parents or grandparents to fully pre-pay their SS.
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Anti vaccine groups push people to leave ICUs
It has come to the point that I am not seeing a downside to this.
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Good to know. Thanks for wading through all the minutia and presenting the big picture for us.
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Ironically, even a tiny bit more in social security taxes during the 50s and 60s would have built up a much nicer reserve. We did pay-as-you-go when we should have been accumulating, and then switched to accumulating when we should have been doing more pay-as-you-go.
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And wading through all the Performance Art. This legislation should have nearly everyone on Board.
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My mom, who just passed, once called a clematis plant chlamydia and we bought it up as often as possible. 
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The Social Security Trust Fund will never go bankrupt so long as the American people want Social Security. Your discussion of the pre-funding was right on point. Thanks to the joint commitment of Reagan and Tip O’Neal to save Social Security for the millenials, we have all paid a lot more in Social Security taxes for decades in order to bulk it up, so there would be enough to take care of the actuarially inevitable flood of pension compensation payments as we moved to our “golden years”.
Here is an anecdote for you. One of my first assignments as a 25 year old, wet behind the ears Washington lawyer was to review a draft of the 1968 annual report of the Social Security trustees. I was shocked - reading the graphs - that the Trust Fund was about to go bankrupt in a decade. I immediately took this shocking news to a senior lawyer, who said: “Don’t worry.”
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Also, a)money is fungible, and b)‘the validity of the public debt of the United States […] shall not be questioned’.
As long as those commitments are on the books, it doesn’t matter what the SS trust fund does, the US Government is legally obligated to pay, even in the event of a government shutdown.
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The thing that worries me is the possibility that these Dems’ motivation may be a response to the Repubs’ election-rigging efforts, i.e. that they believe that we’re headed for semi-permanent minority rule (whether or not we actually are) and, rather than do anything to fight it, are positioning themselves as “Dems but not really” to try to salvage their careers under the perceived new order.
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Where are the counter ads from Democrats showing seniors with rotten infected teeth that imply Manchin doesn’t want to expand Medicare to include dental? They should be running the ads 24/7 in W. Virginia where there are a lot of people with bad and missing teeth. Seriously, they should run a commercial of an old woman with 3 teeth left saying she hasn’t been able to eat nutritious food in years because she has no teeth. Now, because of a bad diet, she has cancer or some other preventive illness. Why don’t the Democrats go there?
They say “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Can’t eat an apple if you don’t have any teeth.
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Yes, it is designed as a pay-as-you-go. But that means that people pay in now, so that people who are retired get a payout now. The previous surpluses were of course from a time when there were far more people working than receiving SS - and in a much lower amount than they do now and for quite some time without an cost-of-living increases.
Social Security is largely a “pay as you go” program, meaning today’s benefits are funded primarily by the payroll taxes collected from today’s workers. For over three decades, however, Social Security collected more in payroll taxes and other income than it paid in benefits and other expenses, and the Treasury invested the surplus in interest-bearing Treasury securities, ultimately reaching a total of nearly $2.9 trillion in trust fund reserves. In 2021, Social Security will begin redeeming those reserves to help pay benefits. Payroll taxes from current workers will continue to pay for the bulk of benefits.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/understanding-the-social-security-trust-funds-0
What’s equally important is that the amount many retirees are receiving is more than they’ve paid in.
Regardless, they need to eliminate - or at least raise - the income level that is taxed.
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Eliminate is step 1. Step 2, now that we’ve all gotten a lot more exposure as to how the rich skip income taxes by hiding income as everything but income, need to start closing some of those gaps so that income is actually reported as income, and not a long-term loan taken out against assets that no regular person has access to.
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I love the metaphor,
Working To Put Out Fires
They might like to try the Indigenous method; cut back the underbrush so fires don’t spread. The Finnish raking technique is another solution.
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