James wrote, " There was no choice as far as SS and the trust fund were concerned. The trust fund was merely the mandated first source of borrowing if the general fund chose to spend money it didn't have."
But there was a political choice whether to spend more than the general fund had available and that political choice is affected by public understanding. The ability to use trust fund money would have been and would still be available if surpluses were not counted as assets to the general fund in annual budget accounting, just more difficult politically. I believe there's evidence of the effect of the public's recent awareness of the practice which supports that conclusion.
Since you seem to believe what good idea it was to have used trust fund money for current general expenditures and increasing the national debt, why stop now. Of course trust fund money can be realized through refinancing with the public as the trust fund need the revenues. But less debt is better for future taxpayers, for the cost of borrowing and because redeeming the assets of the trust fund is but one of the costs that the general fund will face as boomers retire. Medicare and Medicaid are worse problems than Social Security given their growth rates. That's why creating political barriers to using trust fund surpluses is important and none is simpler than an agreement to not use the word surplus unless the national debt is being reduced by an equivalent amount.
