Quick, efficient, and filled with right-wing euphamisms.

1. raise the FICA taxes on the boomer generation to "solve" the funding "problem".
2. create huge surpluses for 30 years, account for those surpluses with "special" t-bills.
3. 30 years later bullshit the boomer generation into agreeing to not pay them back their hard earned interest bearing t-bill surplus.

For extra credit: totally bullshit everyone into privatizing SS so that wall street can churn 150 million individual accounts for profit and plunder.

Dated August 2, 2001, I kept the article from my local paper. This is as close to my copy as exists on the internet.

[link:http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20010802&slug=socsec02|

I'll go with Plan A: pay me my fucking money back that you think you own. Thanks.

Your assertion in 3) was spot on. They intend to convince us that because our money is 'gone', we shouldn't expect it to be paid back.

The problem with that theory is, it can be applied to any debt the US owes. Since we spent the money loaned to us, it's just gone. Once they try to claim that, however, demand for US Treasuries should drop to zero overnight. After all, if we won't pay back our own citizens, what chance does China or a sovereign wealth fund have of getting their money back?

I'm sure most of the rich don't want to die, either, but they have as much ability to avoid death as they do losing wealth by paying taxes....it will happen, one way or another.

Those rich and powerful people rely on the Treasury being able to sell US debt.

Refusing to redeem the "Trust Fund" T-bills is exactly the same as refusing to redeem the T-bills sold on the open market. Leading to a collapse of the wealth and power of those same rich and powerful people.

They'll just cause SS to keep rolling over the ones they hold and not take the cash, because they're, you, know, nothing but IOUs and the money's already spent and we don't want to drive up the deficit and hurt job creators and all that.

Because if the Treasury can do that to the Trust Fund's T-bills, they can do that to anyone's T-bills. Which means all our bonds are suddenly junk bonds.

They have a name for the "nothing but IOUs" people. Morons.

Just so. No pall cast across the other t-bills that pay out normally.

They've got the same "full faith and credit" as the 'regular' ones.

It will be the SSA "voluntarily" rolling them over into new T-bills, while at the same time cutting SS payouts to retirees. Treasury's hands will stay clean and our T-bills won't lose any love in the financial markets.

U R right jeff47, 100%.

They're the most desirable note in the world, hence the awful return. Considered to have zero risk.

Every week, about $540 billion or so are redeemed, re-issued, or created anew.

Social Security will be redeeming about $12 billion per week or so for the next 35-40 years, so you can see that it's not a large piece of the routine business of Treasury - less than 3% of volume.

The people trying to panic us, of course, are the sellers of private securities - if they can talk us into switching the $2.6 trillion in the Trust Fund to private hands, the first commission alone would be worth in excess of $150 BILLION dollars.

About $24 trillion annually passes through the auctions of the Fed. The whole $2.6 trillion at once would not be terribly remarkable, but the real $500 billion or so annually is a gnat's ass.

is about a 130 billion a year, something like .7% of GDP. And thats a worst case scenario.

Dean Baker in 1998 and it still holds true

Social Security projections are based on extremely pessimistic economic assumptions: that growth will average just 1.8 percent over the next twenty years, a lower rate than in any comparable period in U.S. history; that growth will slow even further in later years, until the rate is less than half the 2.6 percent of the past twenty years; that there will be no increase in immigration even when the economy experiences a labor shortage because of the retirement of the Baby Boom generation; and that this labor shortage will not lead to a rapid growth in wages. Both possibilities excluded in these projections -- increased immigration and rapid wage growth -- would increase the fund's revenues. These projections are genuinely a worst-case scenario.
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/98jul/socsec.htm