Benefits v. Boondoggles

I have commented on the Social Security issue in a manner that could be construed as critical of the system, but those that I've quoted on the subject were bipartisan representatives selected to articulate that which both Democrats and Republicans have avoided acknowledging for decades. The economists that said "Fix Social Security" could have also said "Save Social Security" because as far as I'm concerned, they are the same. When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that raiding the Trust Fund constituted embezzlement twenty years ago, he was right. It should have never happened, and if it hadn't been for military expenditures associated with the Vietnam War, it may not have. President Johnson came up with the idea of a "unified budget" to disguise the cost of that war in 1968. The debts incurred henceforth became known as "off budget" expenditures, or put another way, the practice of using Trust Fund surpluses to hide the size of the overall federal deficit became known as "Intra-Governmental Holdings of Debt" (which is what President George W. Bush presented when he opened a file cabinet full of IOUs to illustrate the problem).

Harry Reid now says that the situation won't become a problem for another twenty years, but the downgrading of U.S. Treasury bonds can only be interpreted as the writing on the wall. Sure, you can wait for twenty years and keep borrowing a trillion and a half dollars a year for the next twenty years, but Standard and Poors was essentially telling Mr. Reid and other politicians that besides accruing massive interest payments on that debt, there are other costs associated with that policy. Mr. Reid is also correct when he says that is remains a "successful program" in the sense that it has provided a reliable source of income for those who can no longer earn it, exactly as intended.

Unfortunately, when FDR unveiled the program, he also said that no one would ever pay more than one percent of their paycheck into the Trust Fund and that occurred at a time when life expectancy was around 63 years. Both assumptions for the future of the system proved to be out of whack, and to compound the problem many seniors are living comfortably on retirement income that exceeds the average worker who is paying into the system. This makes the entire subject rather difficult to debate in terms of fairness, so the debate never takes place, at least not in a meaningful sense. (But we do know that the widows of coal miners and fisherman lost at sea are not starving in the streets because of the loss of their loved ones as was the case in the 1930's. They have been replaced by journalists who criticize public officials). 

There are some very clear choices that could be made to alleviate the pressure on the Social Security Trust Fund however. First and foremost, we have always been told that any and all "cuts" must exclude military spending, the same way that local governments exclude police and fire from budget cuts. There is a huge difference. Police and fire provide an immediate and tangible benefit to taxpayers. In some cases, they literally can't live without them. The military on the other hand has demonstrated an uncanny ability to follow one fiasco with another. As far as tangible benefits, those that can be defined as actually defending Americans from aggression or harm, the nuclear deterrent remains the only significant value to taxpayers. The threat of tactical nuclear weapons has kept the peace for the last sixty years, not the "boots on the ground" invasions that have left so many countries in shambles prior to the withdrawal of American troops after varying degrees of failure.

There is no threat to Americans from Taliban air raids. There is no threat to Americans that requires troops stationed in Germany or Japan. And if you look at the cost-to-value ratio of any military action in the last sixty years, it is difficult to understand what the objective was when the idea was conceived after assessing the actual results. I am most certainly a biased commentator on this subject, but the Social Security Trust Fund and its viability, indeed the viability of the U.S. Treasury and its financial instruments, have most certainly been put in jeopardy by these pointless, misdirected and sometimes counterproductive excursions by the U.S. military. The reasons are debatable, the blame can be shared amongst a bunch of walking Christmas trees that were never that smart to begin with, a bunch of clowns that wouldn't last very long in the private sector and are rarely found in CEO positions once they leave the Armed Services. (The same people that told us that the guy who shot up Fort Hood was a "model officer" before he redefined the term for them).

So I have concluded, and challenge anyone that would care to offer a rebuttal, that the Social Security Trust Fund should be restored to the status it enjoyed in 1968 when it became a slush fund for Military Kooks who needed a ton of money to prove that they could screw up anything they become involved with. Especially decisions about how to spend the taxpayers money in terms of any discernible return on that investment.  

© humble journalist