Reply #80: This is another right wing talking point...

[ljm2002]

...trying to tell people "the money is not there", "it's just a bunch of IOUs".

Well, if you consider U.S. Treasury notes to be just a bunch of IOUs, okay then. But if the U.S. defaults on its Treasury notes then it is for all intents and purposes bankrupt and we'll have bigger fish to fry than just Social Security funding. So as far as I'm concerned, the money is there. It is in the form of U.S. Treasury notes that have been one of the most rock-solid instruments in finance in the world for many long years now.

Of course, our lawmakers have chosen to borrow funds for their endless wars, which are financed off the books so that the wars don't show up as contributing to the deficit, but now they want to make it so that Social Security does contribute to the deficit. This bit of sleight of hand is being done calculatedly, so they can weaken it and/or privatize it but most of all so they really can avoid paying it back without acknowledging the essential bankruptcy of our system. It's a scare tactic. The more they can undermine faith in the system, the easier it is to dismantle and privatize it.

If you want to get into a theoretical discussion of what is money, well that is a big subject. Yes it's all bits and bytes, but that is true of most of the so-called money in the world these days and is not specific to Social Security.