Social Security Has No Trust
Fund
By Ben Cerruti
There are those in government and elsewhere that
still wish to insult the intelligence of the public by referring to a Social
Security Trust Fund when it simply does not exist. Let us look at the
simple facts.
Payroll taxes deducted from wage earners
paychecks are used to buy U.S. Government Bonds. The money the government
collects from this action is put into the general fund and is spent. The
spending includes what is paid to retirees. When the time comes to redeem the
bonds who is there to redeem them, with interest, but the taxpaying public. The
so called Trust Fund shows up only on paper as an investment that in reality
does not exist. It is essentially a facade to attempt to hide the true
fact that the payroll taxes taken from younger taxpayers are being transferred
to the older retirees as time progresses.
When social security was first introduced there
were some 40 wage earners for every retiree to enable this pay-as-you-go program
to function without undue hardship on the wage earners. With the ever
increasing life spans and reduction in the size of families there is
now estimated to be only 3.3 wage earners for every retiree and this ratio is
forecasted to continue to decrease to 2 in the foreseeable future. Any
rational person should see that the present system, as presently conceived, at
some point will simply no longer provide wage earners a reasonable minimum
income stream when they retire.
It is unbelievable that some of our elected
representatives apparently do not want to see the obvious and continue to
attempt to deceive the public in their pursuit of personal political or other
gain. I hope in a small way these words will help those who may
be not be that well informed and are susceptible to the rhetoric from
these irresponsible officials in responsible positions. There simply are
no funds in the Social Security Trust Fund.