Dear Editor,
Some unsigned commenter to the Readers’ Column keeps perpetuating a myth, week after week, that the Social Security System is on a sound financial footing and has a $2.8 trillion surplus. Where does this completely misleading and erroneous information come from? Most likely from the Daily KOS or some other left-wing socialist (or “progressive”, as they prefer to be called) organization that regularly spews such nonsense.
As Paul Harvey was so fond of saying, “Here’s the rest of the story”
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer has stated, “This claim (i.e., $2.8 trillion SS surplus) is a breathtaking fraud. The pretense is that a flush trust fund will pay retirees for the next 26 years. Lovely, except for one thing: The Social Security trust fund is a fiction. In other words, the Social Security trust fund contains nothing.”
The truth is that the federal government has borrowed all of that trust fund money and spent it. And the only way the trust fund can get some cash to pay Social Security benefits is if the federal government draws it from general revenues or borrows the money, which it does on a regular basis, presently to the tune of over $18 trillion.
Quoting from the Social Security Trustees Report of Aug. 14, 2014, “Social Security ran a $71 billion deficit in 2013, closing out four years of consecutive cash-flow deficits as the program’s unfunded obligations continue to grow. According to the 2014 annual report from the programs’ trustees, the combined 75-year unfunded obligation of the Social Security and Disability Insurance Trust Funds is $13.4 trillion, a $1.1 trillion increase from last year’s unfunded obligation of $12.3 trillion.”
Perhaps the weekly “progressive” writer to the Readers’ Column can explain to me why it was necessary to add $71 billion to our national debt to pay Social Security recipients in 2013 when you claim Social Security has a $2.8 trillion surplus?
Sincerely,
Dieter G. Dauber
Owego, N.Y.
