Matt Bai, last seen "writing about Paul Ryan's budget plan...without writing about Paul Ryan's budget plan now turns his questionable journalistic skills to Social Security, leaving us with this inane analogy:
The liberal groups that are already speaking out against the debt panel’s unfinished work have chosen to start with Social Security because it is likely to be at the center of any budget compromise. "If there’s a place where it looks like Republicans and Democrats can reach agreement, we’re afraid it’s Social Security," says Frank Clemente, the director of Strengthen Social Security. (In other words, the two parties might actually work together on something. They must be stopped!)
The coalition bases its case on the idea that Social Security is actually in fine fiscal shape, since it has amassed a pile of Treasury Bills — often referred to as i.o.u.’s — in a dedicated trust fund. This is true enough, except that the only way for the government to actually make good on these i.o.u.’s is to issue mountains of new debt or to take the money from elsewhere in the federal budget, or perhaps impose significant tax increases — none of which seem like especially practical options for the long term. So this is sort of like saying that you’re rich because your friend has promised to give you 10 million bucks just as soon as he wins the lottery.
No, Matt, it's not like that at all. It's more like if you loaned a guy 10 million bucks with a signed contract that the guy pays you back in say, 30 years time. But what happened in the interim? Specifically, it's like this: Rich guys "borrowed" money from the stiffs who agreed to 1983 increases in their payroll contributions to an insurance system -- the healthiest and most efficiently run program in US history, by the way -- in order to ensure that they're more populous generation would have a surplus when it moved into retirement. And now the rich guys don't want to pay it back through surrendering tax breaks or paying their debt.
And since when did getting the government to repay the benefits it collected from citizens for the sole purpose of paying them back in the future become the lottery? What happened to "full faith and credit" of Treasury bills?
The working and middle classes responsibly paid into a system to build up a surplus for their retirement years. The rich "borrowed" it in the meantime. And if they don't pay it back, it means they "stole" it.