Social security lives in a parallel universe to the budget, so they could cancel the program entirely and it wouldn't affect the deficit. Mixing it up with the regular budget is a way to confuse people into being open to killing it, a long-term goal of the cadre of financial geniuses who brought us The Great Depression.
Medicare is another story, and until the US has a come to Jesus moment on single payer healthcare and confronting the regulatory capture in healthcare it will only get worse.
> Social security lives in a parallel universe to the budget, so they could cancel the program entirely and it wouldn't affect the deficit.
100% true, if you're operating in sane-world where anything makes sense.
Here in insane world, my pet theory is that, given another year (maybe two, they might wait until after the midterms, assuming they hold on to congress) we're going to see an attempt to nullify the government debt owned by Social Security by converting it into some convoluted scheme involving crypto-backed-by-the-stock-market or something. Ta-da, debt reduced, deficit reduced (by the amount of interest on the debt owned by the trust fund)! Plus sooooo many opportunities to steal.
This'll kill the program stone-dead, but it'll take a little while. Kinda like how they already killed Obamacare by removing the individual mandate, and they're just waiting for the death-spiral to hit bottom so they can declare the program a failure and proof that we should never try to fix healthcare in any kind of actually-decent way again.
Haha. Last time it took the great depression and intense economic pain for americans to snap out of it and actually build a slightly better world (New Deal). I wouldn't expect it to take anything less this time around. Europe required 2 world wars and over 100M dead.
> they could cancel the [social security] program entirely and it wouldn't affect the deficit
I don't think this is true. During the surplus years the savings vehicle was US bonds. So social security lent the US government money.
Now that we are not in a surplus situation, we are using money from those bonds to pay benefits (we are also using SS revenue of course, only part of the payouts come from the bonds).
So if the program were cancelled, the bonds could revert back to the US government - in other words a bunch of debt would be forgiven and would not need to be paid out. Deficit (and debt) reduced.
> So if the program were cancelled, the bonds could revert back to the US government - in other words a bunch of debt would be forgiven
That seems like a passive-voice way of saying "We could steal from millions of people, pocketing the retirement savings they worked for their entire lives."
Also, there's nothing stopping Social Security from upping the cap and thus returning to surplus, aside from the group of people who would absolutely love to steal from the fund.
>That seems like a passive-voice way of saying "We could steal from millions of people, pocketing the retirement savings they worked for their entire lives."
You brought up cancelling the program. I was just pointing out that your statement about it having no effect on the deficit was incorrect.
> That seems like a passive-voice way of saying "We could steal from millions of people, pocketing the retirement savings they worked for their entire lives."
For a lot of younger people the view is they promised themselves something unsustainable and expect young people to cover it.
Is it? Is that a thing that has been shown to motivate young voters?
If anything I would believe that younger voters would be in favor of more social safety net. Many would be comfortable with the government outright nationalizing most industries.
More social safety net that goes to everyone, not just the people directly responsible for destroying this one. It's hard to be asked to bail out people who intentionally spiked the ball.
I guess "the children are our future" really was what they meant, we just misinterpreted it.
Medicare is another story, and until the US has a come to Jesus moment on single payer healthcare and confronting the regulatory capture in healthcare it will only get worse.