More on Social Security and the "Trust Fund"

It's not the latest, but in case any of you haven't heard yet, the "trust fund" is 225 pieces of paper in two folders in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet in a government building in West Virginia. For those who argue that the trust fund is secure, I will concede that the drawer is locked. However, it is essentially worthless. Yes, government bonds are worth something to an individual, but in this case, it's the government writing itself an IOU. If you don't see the problem with that yet, look at it this way: if the government did not have a trust fund, when the amount social security took in was less than it was paying out, what options would it have? It could a) raise taxes, b) cut benefits, or c) borrow money. Now, with the trust fund, what will the government have to do in about fifteen years when intake can't meet outtake? Well, to fund the payment of those IOU's, it will have to a) raise taxes, b) cut benefits, or c) borrow money. Not a whole lot of difference there, is there?

Of course, there's always Sen. Jon Corzine's (D-N.J.) idea: we could fund the defecit by printing more money! What a boneheaded thing for an American politician to say! That would create a little thing called inflation, which would act, in effect, as both a benefit cut and a tax hike. In addition, it would scare away foreign investors because it's a stupid economic policy, which would cause many more economic woes. Latin America has tried the same basic thing, and look where it is now (well, now it's rebounding from from all the problems that caused, I should say look where that got it). If that's not bad enough, he even highlights the quote on the front page of his website. [Right side, currently about a third of the way down. At this point, I was going to throw in a screenshot, but then I noticed that this doesn't have image hosting, and geocities gets mad when you store images on there to get referenced by other web pages. Contact me if you want the screenshot.]

There is so much rank stupidity in the social security debate. Actually, it's not even much of a debate, as only one side is actually seriously addressing the issue using facts and whatnot, while the other side is hyperventilating in its anti-Bush hysteria and can only manage a bunch of scaremongering.

Question: What ever happened to good faith debate?
Answer: The Democrats!

Currently, the Democrats' talking points are composed of lies about the Republican plan (although there isn't an exact plan out there yet, most of the allegations that the dems level have been completely ruled out by Republicans), lies about the financial state of Social Security (such as that the trust fund is reliable), and lies about market based retirement accounts vs. retirement "accounts" based solely on government bonds (and, in truth, not even on that).

I think I shall do another post on Social Security before long, try to fight a few more myths.