This shouldn’t even be a question.
Shameful.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/social-security-debt-ceiling-default-49f0c755
“…Congress might use a tactic it deployed during debt ceiling negotiations in February 1996. To pay Social Security benefits that March, lawmakers allowed the Treasury to borrow $29 billion, a sum Congress temporarily exempted from the debt limit.”
So wait now, if Congress can just exclude $29 billion at will, how much does the debt ceiling really matter? 🤔
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1163448930/what-is-the-debt-ceiling-explanation
/2
The WSJ article also mentions that the Treasury Department could also dip into Social Security’s $2.8 Trillion trust fund to pay benefits on time.
/2.5
(I didn’t see a gift link option :/ )
https://www.wsj.com/articles/social-security-debt-ceiling-default-49f0c755
It's a weird thing to say, considering the trust fund is already, by law, deposited into the general fund of the Treasury to be spent like anything else.
That money is already accounted for.
@volkris Exactly! This shouldn’t even be an issue— however, they consider paying out SS benefits as “public debt”— they mix up the pot of funds and don’t “prioritize one form of spending over another.”
Luckily there is a law from 1996 that allows for the gov’t to draw down SS and Medicare trust funds, but it looks like there could still be complications.
That's not quite right. SS isn't a public debt, but rather it's just another government program, not legally particularly different from paving a road or buying a fighter jet.
The critical thing here is that for generations so many politicians have outright lied for the American public about how SS works, emphasizing trust funds that are little more than artificial accounting, and making people feel like they paid into a savings account when really they paid into just more tax revenue, by law.
So Social Security is just an ongoing program of the United States, and if you ever receive a annual statement from the government talking about what you can expect from SS you'll see that most of the time it tries to make this clear, that the program can change at any moment, again just like Congress can change spending on fighter jets.
Social Security payouts are based on available funding and congressional willingness to keep the program going, nothing more.
At this moment the last Congress left the US government short of funding, so all of the programs are at risk for budgetary tightening.
No the thing I'm trying to emphasize is that it's not actually a public debt.
Politicians have been telling us for years that it is, but legally it's not.
There is no legal obligation for the federal government to pay Social Security, despite the rhetoric of politicians who have flat out lied to us about that for generations, and we really need to face that so we can fix it.
The US government could stop paying Social Security any day now if it wanted to, and we would have no legal claim to that money because it is not a debt. I mean practically it won't do that tomorrow, but since the plan for financing Social Security is not sustainable, under the current rules it will stop paying out in a few years.
So again, it's really important to emphasize, Social Security is not a public debt, it's just one of the many programs that the US government funds every year. But it is not indebted to us legally even though politicians keep misinforming us about that.
@volkris That’s true, but with way they pay it out, they have to get approval in terms of the debt ceiling limit.
It’s a “public debt” in the sense of an obligation to be taken care of, or a bill to be paid. They pay all such bills from a giant pot.
I don’t agree with how they do it— it’s incredibly inefficient and not the way it should work.