The Social Security Trust Fund Isn't a Fiction

Krauthammer is a big liar. If I could find someone to take my bets, I could get rich betting on his columns being lies.

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/11/the-real-trust-fund-fiction.html

Kevin Drum explains that the surplus in the Social Security Trust fund allowed taxes on the wealthy to be cut, and that it's only fair that taxes on the wealthy should go back up to repay the money in the Trust Fund that was used to finance lower taxes. If it's not paid back, then it is, plainly and simply, a raid by the wealthy (through tax cuts) on the funds working class households are relying upon, and are counting on -- they held their end of the bargain and paid more into the system that it needed for decades -- for their retirements:

No, the Social Security Trust Fund Isn't a Fiction, by Kevin Drum: Charles Krauthammer is upset that Dick Durbin says Social Security is off the table in the fiscal cliff negotiations because it doesn't add to the deficit...

What Krauthammer means is that as Social Security draws down its trust fund, it sells bonds back to the Treasury. The money it gets for those bonds comes from the general fund, which means that it does indeed have an effect on the deficit. That much is true. But the idea that the trust fund is a "fiction" is absolutely wrong. ...

Starting in 1983, the payroll tax was deliberately set higher than it needed to be to cover payments to retirees. For the next 30 years, this extra money was sent to the Treasury, and this windfall allowed income tax rates to be lower than they otherwise would have been. During this period, people who paid payroll taxes suffered from this arrangement, while people who paid income taxes benefited.

Now things have turned around. As the baby boomers have started to retire, payroll taxes are less than they need to be to cover payments to retirees. To make up this shortfall, the Treasury is paying back the money it got over the past 30 years, and this means that income taxes need to be higher than they otherwise would be. For the next few decades, people who pay payroll taxes will benefit from this arrangement, while people who pay income taxes will suffer.

If payroll taxpayers and income taxpayers were the same people, none of this would matter. The trust fund really would be a fiction. But they aren't. Payroll taxpayers tend to be the poor and the middle class. Income taxpayers tend to be the upper middle class and the rich. ... When wealthy pundits like Krauthammer claim that the trust fund is a fiction, they're trying to renege on a deal halfway through because they don't want to pay back the loans they got.

As it happens, I think this was a dumb deal. But that doesn't matter. It's the deal we made, and the poor and the middle class kept up their end of it for 30 years. Now it's time for the rich to keep up their end of the deal. Unless you think that promises are just so much wastepaper, this is the farthest thing imaginable from fiction. It's as real as taxes.