"As of 2021, the reserves are predicted to dry up by 2033. That doesn’t mean it will totally collapse, it just means the “Trust Fund” where extra money goes will run out. To compensate, SSA will need to either increase the payroll tax, or reduce benefits or some other resource must be tapped."
There is no "money" in the trust fund, and there never has been. This is the grand lie of federal finance that is exposed by Social Security, but it isn't limited to the program.
The problem isn't with the Social Security program, but with the fallacy of general misconceptions surrounding how our government funds itself and our economy. Social Security is simply where the inconsistencies are most evident. The program's perceived funding is one of the largest contributors to wealth inequality, so its reality is unlikely to be made well known as it would point to glaringly regressive intentions on the part of our leadership since '46 when a New York Fed chairman wrote a paper titled "Taxation For Revenue Is Obsolete".
What is the trust fund? Surplus money collected by the FICA tax (Federal Insurance Contributions Act, the official name of Social Security) purchases government bonds. The money from those bonds goes into the General Fund where it is spent.
This is not possible. The Fed destroys all "revenue" of the Treasury by applying it to reducing the debt. It ceases to be "money" when it clears the banking system and re-enters the government sector where it was born as debt. The source of the funds, or its intended purpose has no bearing because all revenue is treated the same with only records of payment and payouts showing they actually ever existed.
When we used the archaic gold standard those records gave a taxpayer a legal claim to a portion of the gold reserve. Now, there is no need for the deductions as a "funding" mechanism and they don't enable the government to more easily pay benefits than it could without them.
New dollars are created every time someone receives payment from the program, or any other spending at the federal level. No taxes or bonds are required, or used, beyond the mentioned purpose of record keeping. How much one receives is entirely a political decision with no correlation to the "fund" or any payments into the system. Ditto for every payment made in US dollars at the federal level.
The nonsensical quality of these two paragraphs simply made it unnecessary to read any further as no fact can emerge from such a non-factual basis of understanding of the system you wish to denigrate.
