1147 Social Security Reserves

A common misconception is that government can save money, specially Social Security, and that there is a cache of money called the Social Security Reserve that is going to run out. That’s an intentional fabrication perpetrated by political demagogues because the constraint is only a legal one: the original Social Security legislation wanted to prevent any money for Social Security coming from general tax revenues, it was the political compromise at the time, so the law says that only money collected specifically as Social Security can be paid out as Social Security. If Social Security needed more money, that clause could be struck from the original law by the very same demagogues. America has come a long way in its spending habits since those halcyon days of old-school accounting & balanced budgets. The whole idea of fiscal responsibility has been abandoned: government now prints as much money as it wants whenever it wants so government would simply act unilateral to fund whatever Social Security needed regardless of so-called reserves.