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Let’s make a deal Mitch! You go right ahead and cut my Social Security and Medicare - so I can skip those pesky doctor visits and meds that improve the quality of life - and in turn you will live on the same amount of money/health coverage that I do. Oh heck, let’s not limit the fun. If cutting these programs seems such a great plan, let House and Senate participate in this Grand and Noble Experiment!Have you forgotten that Social Security comes straight out of worker’s paychecks? It was quick thinking on the part of those who created the program. Some people can save money and live on their income, they do not have that discipline, so they did the discipline part for us. Now, what does it say about a government that is willing to take what is not theirs, to fill a hole created by that government. For whatever reason, poor management, or big corporation buyouts which constituted a big chunk of the 8+ Trillion less than was n 10 years ago. It sure as hell this deficit is in no way the fault of those who contributed every payday.There was a time in our history when Americans felt protected and lucky to have a government that would never lie, cheat or steal from them. They felt secure, safe and most voted regularly. In the late 70’s, early 80’s cracks began to form in the relationship between the government and it’s people. Little lies seeped out under closed doors. Then a flood, and then a tidal wave. Can anything ever be done to turn this tide.?

It would be a mistake to assume all conservatives are in favor of Social Security and/or Medicare.When you take a look at the details, Social Security is a disaster for the American citizens that rely on it the most. You surrender 15% of your income for your entire working career, and if you live into your 80’s, you get barely a 2% return. Indeed, if you’re black or a member of some other group with a lower life expectancy, odds are quite good that you’ll never get back what you paid into the system.If the average American were free to opt out and invest his own money in average-returning financial products over the same period of time, he would be able to collect nearly five times as much at retirement. And when he passes away, at least he has a considerable nestegg to pass down to his heirs, helping ensure the prosperity of future generations.Instead, we get government bureaucrats substituting their judgment for ours, and using the gullible taxpayer to fund whatever ponzi scheme government wants to set up next. If the people were better able to grasp the financial details of programs like Social Security, they’d be chasing down our leaders with pitchforks.

This one is so easy, and it baffles me that the media won’t correct the confusing words that are used to describe the problem at hand.The primary job of Congress is to fund the government. That’s it. Just pass a budget, and don’t screw up the economy. The government buys things, and they bring money in, and they borrow money when they don’t have enough money to pay for what they’re buying. Presumably, when they have to borrow money, they’re smart enough to raise more money to pay back what they are borrowing.That paragraph above is the whole picture. Really, it’s the primary job that those representatives we elect have to do.How does the government raise money? Well, these days, it’s primarily by taxes on you and me as citizens. How do they borrow money? A key component of borrowing is the issuing of bonds (think of them like an IOU) that are purchased on the open market. Like all bonds, these carry an interest rate. So essentially the government takes out a loan in the form of a bond that it promises to repay. For this discussion, another component of borrowing over the past few decades has been to borrow money from the Trust Funds (Social Security is a Trust Fund.) Those Trust Funds are set up so that they can loan money to the Federal government when they have a surplus.The Trust Funds (like Social Security) are not part of that budget that Congress needs to manage. Those trust funds are set up intentionally to be beyond the greedy little fingers of corrupt managers. They have income clearly defined, and they have expenses clearly defined. They are solvent. However, as our country’s population ages, there will come a time (in a matter of many years) when the income to those trust funds will need to be raised to account for the aging population. Right now, folks with higher incomes actually pay less (as a percent of their total income) in Social Security tax than folks with average or lower income. The tax is set up so you have to pay no matter how little you make, but at a certain point (right now a little over $100k/year) you get to stop paying the tax. This means that the more you earn, the lower your Social Security tax is.Any worries about the future point (remember many years away) when the fund would need to raise taxes could be ERASED IMMEDIATELY if Congress would simply say that everyone has to pay the same Social Security tax rate by eliminating the cap on the tax. Of course, everyone in Congress makes more than the cap, so of course, they won’t take this step. But remember, this is not complicated at all. This single step of eliminating the cap would fix any future concern for as far as the eye can see.So the last couple of paragraphs have talked about how to assure that the current Social Security trust fund remains solvent in the future. IT IS SOLVENT NOW, and will remain so for many years. But to fix any future issues, there is a very simple fix that Congress could implement tomorrow. Why don’t they?Now let’s talk about the federal budget. Remember that Social Security has nothing to do with that federal budget, other than the fact that the federal government has been borrowing from that trust fund for years. Lately, the government has not been able to borrow from that fund. In fact, the government has amassed quite a debt to the Social Security trust fund as they borrowed for years from it.You might ask, “Why was the government borrowing all this money from the trust fund? Why didn’t they just leave it alone?” For the past few decades, since the 1980’s, it has become very popular for elected officials to achieve that “elected” status by promising to cut taxes, even when the budget didn’t allow them to cut taxes. Sure they could have reduced spending, but they didn’t. They increased spending, and they cut taxes anyway.So they had to borrow money.And now they are being asked to repay the money that they borrowed. It’s that simple. Our elected officials cut taxes without paying for those tax cuts with spending cuts. One of the credit cards they used to help fund those tax cuts was borrowing from the Social Security trust fund. They have reached their credit limit on that credit card, and the bank is asking them to repay the money they promised they would repay.It is really that doggone simple.But Mr. McConnell and other weasels up in Washington want you to think that it’s more complex than that. They want you to think that Social Security has a problem. The problem is that Mr. McConnell’s creditor is asking him to pay back the money he borrowed, and Mr. McConnell is trying to weasel his way out of his debt by making it sound like the creditor has a problem.Granted, the weasels like McConnell have been committing this irresponsible management on behalf of us, the American people. We elected them after all. And I do agree that we are accountable for whom we elect. It is my fervent hope that we are getting smarter, and results of tomorrow’s election will indicate whether we are continuing to elect lying cheats like McConnell or whether we’re finally starting to turn the tide and send people to Washington who will behave with just a tiny little shred of honesty and decency. We’ll see.As to the current situation, the federal budget answer is pretty easy. Mr. McConnell and our elected officials need to raise taxes in order to pay the bills that they have incurred. It’s that simple. They know it, but they won’t say it. Why won’t they say it? Because they just passed this massive tax giveaway debacle earlier this year, which compounded the problem even more. THIS IS WHY THEY ARE IN CRISIS—THEY CUT THEIR OWN FUNDING. This is why they can’t pay their bills.Why is it that the media doesn’t expose their lies every time they utter them? Why doesn’t the media correct them every time they tell this lie, and ask why they are confusing the solvency of the trust fund with the federal deficit. They are two separate things. They are only intertwined to the extent that the federal government needs to repay the billions that they have borrowed from the trust funds. They borrowed that money to help pay for tax cuts. Now it’s time to repay the money. How they gonna do it?Well, Mitchy boy, how ya gonna do it?EDIT on 7November:Lots of folks get hung up on my comments above that if Mitch wanted to solve his crisis he could do it tomorrow by eliminating the earnings cap. This misses the point. The point is that there is no crisis that involves Social Security (etc). We have a budget crisis, and that budget crisis has been caused and exacerbated by the misguided GOP tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy.That is the crisis, and Mitch needs to own that. He is lying to folks by trying to make Social Security the bad guy, but Social Security is just fine. Mitch just needs to pay his bills.Which is where the problem comes in: One of his bills is repayment of the loans that Congress has been taking from the Social Security Trust Fund while the Fund had a big surplus. Congress borrowed the money with the promise to repay, and Mitch wants us to think that he shouldn’t have to repay. He’s doing this because he doesn’t want us to see what a colossally bad job Congress has been doing of their one big job — manage the budget.At some point Social Security revenue and benefits need to be tuned, just as we have tuned them in the past. We can do that now, but there is no hurry. Right now the crisis is that Congress has dramatically cut funding to the government (again) by cutting taxes on the wealthy (again) and Mitchy and that crowd need to fix that problem.Steven Pritikin offered a wonderful comment that does a great deal to clarify, and with his permission I include that below:I would advise anyone interested in this discussion to read ‘The Truth About Social Security: The Founders’ Words Refute Revisionist History, Zombie Lies, and Common Misunderstandings’ by Nancy Altman. Social security is an insurance policy meant to replace lost wages due to retirement or disability. It lends money to the gov’t through its buying of treasury bonds with surplus funds in any fiscal year. It does this because it is the safest investment that can be made (as long as we don’t alow the US treasury to default). If the treasury didn’t sell bonds to the SSA then it would have to sell them elsewhere to keep the government operating. There is no way around repaying these debts whether to ourselves or to other entities without a total collapse of our financial system.That a collapse becomes more likely every year is not the fault of Social Security but that of greedy idiots sucking off the public tit with giant tax breaks and unchecked spending. As for the argument that since we are living longer, and the trust fund will be depleted sooner, legislative changes to the Trust fund have been recently made raising the full retirement age from 65 to 66 and then to 67. With what is going on with the environment and our health care our national life expectancy has dropped to 31st among other nations. While the current administration likes to ignore science as well as economics, acturaries work for SSA as well as all other insurance companies and can tell well ahead of time when changes need to be made to secure the trust fund.