Dear Mrs. Weaver. I am going to rephrase a Q. Mr. R. has not answered. Lets take a lady. Call her Carol. Works and pays SS for forty years. Never married. (Don't complicate it.) In each of those years, her SS $ were used to pay office expense and current retirees. Any of her money left over, went automatically into the general fund. A treasury bookkeeping entry was made under the heading SSTF. Carol's $ were included in the special bonds credited to the SSTF.
Carol's $ were gone. Vamoose. Congress never had to borrow or steal it. By 1935 law, it was automatic and annual. But Congress never invested Carol's $. WHY NOT? Because is is no longer Carol's money. It is now Congress' money. It is a magical transformation of taxpayers (TP's) paycheck/investment/tax/contribution into her and all future TP's debt.
Congress invested their new money in the most safe of all possible, their own Gov't bonds, "backed up by the full faith and credit of --- ," and, incidentally by the legal oblligation of the IRS to get it ALL again from Carol and all future TP's. Fast. Easy. Automatic. Plus annual interest, compounded, skyrocketing TP debt. Carol retires this year. Every year, her $'s have paid office expense, current retirees and to build up more TP debt in the SSTF. Our SSTF debt is now near $1 trillion. Rob Reischauer, Brookings, just told us in his position paper that the SSTF debt is expected to be $4.4 trillion by the year 2020. Talk about skyrocketing!
If Carol had not been under SS, had never saved a dime, had invested thousands of $ in stocks, bonds, savings accounts and Ponzi schemes and had lost every dime, she would have zilch today. Precisely the same as having been under SS for forty years.
Under SS, every dime in Carol's checks will come from current workers. It has always been thus. Her return on her "investment," as Henry Aaron said, is minus 100% I think Henry did not want this fact to be widely known, but he was being honest.
Pity the victims working after 2020. God help them all.
Carolyn, is this a fair assessment of past history and of current reality?
Mr. R did not answer a similar question. His silence might be more instructive to some than an answer. Only a few days left for you to be here on this forum . It seems that we are wasting some time.
Don new email addr = donh@cboss.com
