Entirely hogwash. Social Security cannot go bankrupt as long as the US government retains the ability to create money, which should be forever. There is no “trust fund” to go bankrupt. It is nothing more than a spreadsheet at Treasury and always was.
Treasury bonds are a good investment, for anyone who isn’t the US government. They are purchased with excess reserves and pay a small interest dividend for swapping liquidity for security and income. As soon as those reserves hit the Treasury they are balanced to zero by the debt that created them, canceled, and cannot “fund” anything. All benefits are paid from general accounting by appropriations via “debt service” as part of the non-discretionary budget.
The bonds, and the taxation that funds them, do nothing to enable the Treasury to pay benefits. They draw down currency/demand, in the economy, originally to defend a gold reserve that we no longer have. The debt makes it impossible for the government to “have” money, but it also doesn’t need money as it creates it at will in the private sector as needed. In spite of archaic gold standard logic prevalent today, it can “afford” anything that is for sale and priced in dollars, regardless of revenue.
Sans a gold reserve, the red ink of our government is the only source of black ink the private sector has. The “debt” is nothing more than a record, to the penny, of currency created by Congress that hasn’t yet been used to pay a federal tax obligation. It is debt because the government “owes” us tax credit for each dollar, not because taxpayers “owe” bondholders. Taxes only serve to prevent inflation and fund no part of our government. Is the amount of the debt too much to have in circulation and savings to enable storing value and retiring private sector bank debt? We can have that discussion, but only from the perspective of economic reality, not myth and lies.
Without a gold reserve to be concerned with, we have no reason not to provide a dignified retirement for “all” workers except the lack of political will. All of the promoted “fixes” for Social Security, Medicare, and any other programs using bonds as funding, only decrease the worker’s share of their productivity and expand income inequities. There is no purpose served in continuing FICA or Medicare deductions, much less raise the cap. They are the most regressive taxes in history and doing so offers no inflation threat. In fact, we could easily end all Treasury bonds and the great lie of the national debt.
