Smack of the day

Courtesy Dr. Krauthammer:

“This [Lew’s] claim is a breathtaking fraud. The pretense is that a flush trust fund will pay retirees for the next 26 years. Lovely, except for one thing: The Social Security trust fund is a fiction. … In other words, the Social Security trust fund contains—nothing.”

That was in response to Obama's budget director, Jack Lew, claiming that Social Security was self-financed, that it was a trust fund... you know, the ol' "lock box". Of course, just last week, the President let the cat out of the bag when he said he would have to withhold Social Security checks if a debt ceiling deal wasn't reached.

All this, after Social Security's own trustees told us there was $2.6 trillion in this alleged self-financing trust fund.

So, who's telling the truth? Is Social Security indepedently solvent or did the President just own up to the fact the "lock box" is full of a bunch of worthless IOUs?

Defenders of the status quo will tell us that Social Security is managed fairly well as far as government programs go and we full-heartedly agree as Ponzi schemes don't normally last the 75+ years that Social Security has.

And as far as the perception that Social Security is some sort of private/personal account... how did that work for President Bush when he proposed privatizing merely 10% of one's Social Security account? Not well, you may recall because far from being a personal account, the public views Social Security as a government entitlement program and unfortunately it is a dependent and unsustainable government program as the President so clumsily confessed to last week.