In the late 1930's the U.S. Congress established a Social Security Fund to provide for aging and disabled workers, through the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA). This fund is a payroll tax, which today is just under 7.65% of your wage, and it currently supports both Social Security and Medicare (Social Security is 6.2% and Medicare is 1.45%); employers must also pay just under 7.65% of your wage to match your contribution. Your monthly Social Security check will be calculated relative to your age when you retire and the amount deducted from your wages during your working years. Even though the amount anyone will receive is figured according to their contributions in the past, every Social Security check comes from the weekly and monthly payroll deductions taken from wages and matching money paid by employers in the present. This amount is just over 15% of the gross wages of almost all workers, up to a wage cap of about $88,000 annually (the Medicare portion is deducted to a higher cap). This is a little less than one-sixth of all wage income. If many are working, then one-sixth of that labor may pay higher benefits and take care of the elderly and disabled adequately; if few are working, then benefits will have to be reduced and many of the elderly without other income may live in privation. Obviously the ability for Social Security to pay benefits depends on the ability of our economy to produce income.
By law, any surplus FICA tax collected by the Social Security Administration is transferred to the U.S. Treasury Department and exchanged for government bonds. The accumulation of these Treasury Bonds is what the government calls our Social Security Trust Fund. This fund, however, is a complete fraud, because the Treasury Department does not invest this money in any manner that preserves it, or require that the government departments receiving it must pay it back in the future. Like all taxes, it is spent as part of the annual Federal Budget and gone forever. It makes no sense to even talk about repayment. Even though these bonds do earn interest annually (additional Treasury Bonds), the interest is a fraud also; these bonds, both principle and interest, do not represent a fund, nor is the administration of this fund a trust, as any dictionary will attest. This bogus fund is just an IOU from Americans to Americans.
In the Reagan, Bush-1 and Clinton years, the Congress and the President attempted to balance the national budget (after the Reagan tax cuts of the early 1980's) by raising FICA taxes beyond what was needed to fund Social Security. The government then took by statute (Borrowed!) these excess dollars to help fund our other government expenses: Housing, Education, Defense, etc. But these excess dollars are spent, and the bonds, along with the interest due, are just promises by government to raise the Income Tax in the future when these bonds are due. For the Social Security Administration to hold bonds, redeemable only by the authority of the U.S. Congress to raise the Income Tax to pay off those bonds, and to call those bonds a Trust Fund, is ludicrous and a fraud. The Social Security Administration would have you believe that it will cost taxpayers less to fund Social Security obligations in the future when these bonds are mature and redeemable. It is truly amazing that people this stupid can be given positions of importance and trust in government.
The idea that the Social Security Administration and the Treasury Department are independent entities with legal standing like citizens or corporations is bogus. The Federal government in its entirety has legal standing, but its parts are not similarly independent. The illusion of separation and independence between the SSA and the Treasury is maintained because the FICA tax is a regressive income tax, hitting the working poor harder than the wealthy. The Social Security tax was instituted 25 years after the Income Tax was established by Congress; it would have been simpler in 1938 to raise the Income Tax on everyone to fund Social Security, but then the wealthy would have objected to paying their fair share, so the politicians bowed to the demands of wealth and we are dealing with the continuing misfeasance of our tax structure today. If our society were just now developing a tax structure to pay our collective bills, Social Security would get its funding from the general Income Tax just as The Defense Dept., Education Dept., Health and Human Services, etc.; because we would require that structure to be fair, by being equitable, in how taxes are raised; and fiscally responsible by taxing our productivity to avoid any kind of debt or phony financing scheme.
When the government sells a bond to any citizen, business, or foreign entity, it is obligated to payoff that bond when due, even if that requires reducing other expenditures, including Social Security, or raising taxes; because government must pay its debts first and foremost. We often hear the term "full faith and credit of the government" with regard to guaranteeing the payment of government debt; without which the government could not entice anyone to lend to it. But the "full faith and credit of government" is irrelevant with regard to the Social Security Trust Fund, because when we the people both own and owe a debt, that debt does not exist; so neither government faith nor credit are applicable in dealing with this issue. It is a mistake for the Treasury Department to issue Treasury Bonds to the Social Security Administration in exchange for surplus Social Security Tax, because it confuses everyone into believing that they are real obligations for payment by the government and the taxpayers that support the government; BUT THEY ARE NOT!
The Social Security Administration has monthly demands on its cash flow, and when its income is projected to be less than its outflow, Congress will need to raise taxes (in one form or another), or reduce benefits to recipients, to keep the Social Security Administration books balanced. It simply does not matter whether Congress raises taxes and that income is given directly to the SSA to meet its obligations, or Congress raises taxes to payoff government bonds held by the SSA, and those proceeds used to fund Social Security. In either case taxes are raised the same amount to cover the cost of maintaining the Social Security system. The Trust Fund bonds themselves are baloney, because they have zero value and liability to we the people.
It should be obvious to all that courts will give trial to cases of debt between different persons, corporations, and countries; but they would not hear a case where a person, corporation, or country was suing itself to collect a debt owed to itself. If the SSA had used its annual surplus to purchase industrial bonds in U.S. companies or government bonds of foreign countries, it would have legal standing to have a court enforce repayment of its investments plus interest, such that the profits of those companies or the taxes of foreign countries could be used by the SSA to support our elderly. Such is not the case with the Social Security Trust Fund. The American people cannot sue the American people to force payment of a debt they owe to themselves. We will either tax ourselves to meet the contemporary needs of Social Security or we will reduce benefits to the level that we can afford.
Consider a village moron going about his daily life, being given menial tasks by several businesses so that he may have a supporting income. The particular act that determines that this person is a moron is that when he spends his wages he writes himself an IOU for the money spent. If our village moron decided to retire and cash-in his IOU's at some bank, what bank would loan him money wherein he was both the creditor and debtor associated with his IOU's? You simply cannot be in debt to yourself.
Amazingly enough the American people have a government that is operating in this moronic manner. The U.S. Treasury is the part of the moron that spent the money to support us, while handing out IOU's, and the Social Security Administration is the part of the moron that holds some of those IOU's, and thinks they are collateral for which the citizenry may redeem for future income. This part of the moron even accepts additional IOU's as interest on the IOU's that are non-existent spent money. The working citizenry are the bank (taxable income) to which the Treasury and Social Security Administration want to come and cash-in those IOU's in the future.
The United States Government cannot buy its own debt in any form, in any department or agency, and profit by, or receive income from such an action. Government does not invest in corporate stocks and bonds, or own industries to produce profits from goods sold to consumers. It taxes the productivity of commerce and spends those taxes yearly. There is not one penny of money in our so-called Social Security Trust Fund; we may only tax the productivity of the present; and the productivity of the future, when and only when it becomes the present.
The national budget was balanced for the first time in a generation in 1998. In fact, it produced a 70-billion dollar surplus; and 1999, 2000, 2001 had larger surpluses. The surplus dollars sent to the Treasury by the Social security Administration and used by the Treasury to pay our general expenses, amounts to another Income Tax; it is in no way an investment that can be redeemed to cover any future need. These budget surpluses are not all from Income Tax; they are mostly from the Social Security Tax, because workers have been overcharged for Social Security for nearly 20 years to balance Federal Budgets; not to build a trust fund.
It is impossible to protect future Social Security requirements with today's FICA surplus. We can only supply ourselves with more goods and services today, or reduce the taxes to be collected next year, or pay off a tiny portion of the principle on the National Debt. There is no difference in income to government, regardless of its name; Income Tax, Social Security Tax, Medicare Tax, Excise Taxes, Usage Fees for national parks, Import Duties, etc.; all are levied by government to provide income, and spent by government in annual budgets. Government does not tax the past or future and government does not save or invest for the past or future, only the present.
If it truly makes sense to over tax people to support one portion of government and give them an IOU that could be redeemed at a profit in the future, then why not change all of our Income Tax, Capital Gains Tax, etc. into FICA Tax? Such that the Treasury Department could borrow all of our government spending requirements from the Social Security Administration and issue many more bonds from which we would presumably become an unbelievably wealthy country as those bonds mature. We can all turn into morons and live off the interest, without disturbing the principle. Whether the government establishes two types of taxes to fund itself or ten types of taxes is irrelevant; if one or more tax streams take in more than they require, their tax rate is too high; and if one or more tax streams takes in less than it requires, their tax rate is too low. The moving of tax receipts from areas of excess to areas of deficit is internal bookkeeping, not an investment. Excess funds that are spent instead of being refunded are gone and irretrievable.
In our current economy the baby-boomers are moving into their most productive and profitable work years, a relatively large group of taxpayers paying relatively larger amounts of Social Security tax, as well as Income Tax. The current senior citizens are enjoying relative affluence in their standard of living. But a few years from now when the baby-boomers are retiring and swelling the ranks of the non-working, there will necessarily be a higher tax burden to support those retirees. The money that will be available to fund Social Security will depend totally on the ability of future workers to pay taxes to government. And the bonds piling up in the so-called Social Security Trust Fund are void and worthless. If tax income cannot be increased, there is absolutely nothing that government can do to change what is coming except raise the age of retirement and lower the amount of benefits to be paid, to match the amount of tax that can be taken from those who labor in our economy.
In 2005 the President and some members of Congress were proposing to "save" what is not yet in peril (it cannot be broke if it presently produces a surplus). Any truly surplus money will remain quietly in the government's accounts. It will simply be a reserve to defraud the taxpayers of the truth about the full extent of our deficit spending, while the Social Security Administration receives more worthless bonds (IOU's) in their fraudulent electronic trust fund.
© March 2009
Craig D. Hanks
This article is taken from a chapter of my book SOCIAL BENCHMARKS. Other excerpts can be viewed at http://beyondfarenough.blogspot.com/.
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