Reply #18: Your social security is just fine

[arikara]

but the chimpanzee/media propaganda is working overtime to make the American people believe otherwise.

Check this interview with Paul Krugman:

<snip>
The important thing to say here is that Social Security is way down on the list of problems we have got. If you were going to take a look at just the budget, we have a huge, immediate problem on the deficit about which Bush intends to do nothing, really. We have a very serious problem on Medicare and Medicaid, which is a big issue. Social Security is the bright spot. It has maybe some mild financial problems, several decades out, and here we are -- he wants a crisis there, partly to distract from the very real crises in other places, and there you go.

<snip>

Social Security is a program which has been traditionally run. It looks like a retirement fund, and it is not exactly. What it really is is a government program with a dedicated tax. We take the payroll tax and it's used to pay benefits to retirees. And 20-plus years ago, the commission led by Alan Greenspan said, you know, we are going to have this problem as the baby boomers reach retirement age. We will have a higher ratio of retirees to workers, and we better get ready for it. Social Security, the payroll tax was increased. There were some other things, a small rise in the retirement age set in motion. So that Social Security would run a surplus, which would be used to accumulate a trust fund, and this would tithe us over, some ways into the aging of the population. And that on its own accounting is working just fine. I mean, one of the things that we need to know is that the estimates of the day at which the trust fund runs out, just keep on receding further into the future, because the program is doing so well at running surpluses. So, ten years ago, people said it was going to run out in 2029. Now the official estimate is 2042. Realistically, it's probably going to go well into the second half of the century. Now how does this become a crisis? Well it becomes a crisis by changing the rules. By saying, oh, well, actually, that surplus that we're running because of the tax increase that was designed to prolong the life of Social Security, that's not real. Because it's invested in government bonds which are a perfectly good asset, for anybody else, but not for the Social Security administration. And so, there was a real crisis that people saw in the 1980's. They dealt with it. The solution worked very well, but because this administration, because the Republican party doesn't want Social Security to remain, because they have always wanted to get rid of it since Franklin Roosevelt, they have decided to redefine the rules so as to call it a crisis when realistically, we have a huge budget problem, but that has nothing to do with Social Security.

<snip>

the rest here:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/21/1535228