U.S. Debt Crisis Startling Facts

Most of what is currently being written about Social Security, totally ignores the most urgent problem facing the program. That problem is the fact that, every dollar of the $2.5 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue, generated by the 1983 payroll tax hike, has already been spent by the government. The trust fund contains no real assets. It is empty!

Most of the articles are written by well-intentioned people, who just amplify the misinformation that the AARP and the NCPSSM have been bombarding their members, and the public, with for years. The myth is that Social Security has $2.5 trillion in, “good- as-gold,” Treasury bonds stashed away in the trust fund that will make possible the payment of full Social Security benefits for decades to come without any action. The message may be comforting to those who believe it, but it is not true.

I have been researching and writing about Social Security for more than a decade, and I have published four books on the subject. The hard fact is that every dime of the $2.5 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue, generated by the 1983 payroll tax hike, has been spent on wars and other government programs. Every month, for the past 25 years, the total receipts from the payroll tax have been split two ways. First, benefits for current retirees are paid from the Social Security revenue. Then, all remaining Social Security revenue, not needed to pay that month’s benefits, are deposited into the general fund and become indistinguishable from other general fund revenue.

Most workers think that at least some of the FICA taxes deducted from their paychecks will be saved and used to pay future Social Security benefits. But it doesn’t work that way. Not a single dime of payroll tax revenue has ever been saved and earmarked for the payment of future benefits. To put it bluntly, the government has “borrowed,” “embezzled,” or “stolen” every penny of the $2.5 trillion of surplus revenue that was supposed to be saved and invested. I consider this to be the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people by their government. I have been trying to expose this awful truth for more than a decade, and some courageous people were trying to expose it even before I stumbled onto the scam in 1999.

On October 13, 1989, Senator Ernest Hollings (D-SC) issued the following warning in a speech on the Senate floor.

“…the most reprehensible fraud in this great jambalaya of frauds is the systematic and total ransacking of the Social Security trust fund ..in the next century…the American people will wake up to the reality that those IOUs in the trust fund vault are a 21st century version of Confederate bank notes.”

A year later, on October 9, 1990 Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) made a similar warning in a Senate speech. He said:

“…on that chart in emblazoned red letters is what has been taking place here, embezzlement. During the period of growth we have had during the past 10 years, the growth has been from two sources. One, a large credit card with no limits on it, and, two, we have been stealing money from the Social Security recipients of this country.”

On January 21, 2005, David Walker, the Comptroller General of the GAO, tried to make it clear to everyone that the trust fund contained no real assets. He said:

“There are no stocks or bonds or real estate in the trust fund. It has nothing of real value to draw down.”

If anyone has any remaining doubts about whether or not the trust fund contains real assets, those doubts should be removed by the following statement from the 2009 Social Security Trustees Report:

“Neither the redemption of trust fund bonds, nor interest paid on those bonds, provides any new net income to the Treasury, which must finance redemptions and interest payments through some combination of increased taxation, reductions in other government spending, or additional borrowing from the public.”

I urge everyone who cares about the future of Social Security to please visit my website at www.thebiglie.net to learn more about Social Security and my efforts to expose the scam. Excerpts from my latest book, “THE BIG LIE: How Our Government Hoodwinked the Public, Emptied the S.S. Trust Fund, and caused The Great Economic Collapse,” are posted on the site. Please feel free to download them.

Allen W. Smith, Ph.D.

Professor of Economics Emeritus

Eastern Illinois University

Website: www.thebiglie.net

Email: ironwoodas@aol.com

Phone: 1-800-840-6812