Social Security is doomed to go bankrupt; everybody acknowledges it isn’t sustainable, yet very little is done except talk about it.
BS. This is only true because the program is constrained in its allowable "funding" by payroll deductions and Treasury bonds. It's only too bad the left didn't take a clue from right wing think tanks and apply the same false logic to military spending.
The reason politicians don't talk about Social Security is because there is no viable solution that connects benefits with the deductions from the spending power of the working class. This critical fact is entirely ignored because the truth doesn't fit the narrative of the right wing or the left wing and it would enrage people to find it out, possibly to the point of mass rebellions.
it is a pay as you go system, with surpluses going into a Trust Fund of IOUs that needs to be paid back with tax increases.
All federal spending is a "pay as you go" system, not just Social Security. In the end, new money will be created for every dollar of benefits paid and money deducted from paychecks will be destroyed by balancing it against the debt that created it. There is no, repeat, "NO" connection between them except for false assumptions and propaganda that relate the spending of the monopoly currency issuer to that of currency "users".
Your error is quite common. It assumes that the debt should be retired, or even that it could be. Treasury bonds, which represent the bulk of our national debt including those dedicated to the Social Security "fund", are IOUs, or a promise to pay in the future with new money creation. The monopoly issuer of a fiat currency has an infinite amount of that money available and never needs to "borrow" its own currency to enable its spending.
Bonds contain no money that is able to actually fund anything. If this weren't true then the bonds held by Social Security wouldn't be part of the national debt and benefit payments could be made without increasing that debt. Other than decreasing the purchasing power of the working class by double digit percentages there is "NO" purpose served by the deductions that enable benefit payments now, or in the future.
If you don't believe me then listen as Allan Greenspan spells it out while under oath as he schools Paul Ryan on how Social Security works. He speaks directly to Ryan's assumption that personal accounts somehow make the program "more secure".
