Except it doesn't. The only way to for SS to collect from the trust fund is from the general fund. That means that in order for SS to get $1 from the general fund:
A) Raise non-SS taxes $1 to go into the general fund.
B) Cut $1 of other spending from the general fund.
C) Increase the deficit by $1
A) The trust fund is in surplus from payroll (FICA) taxes.
B) The general fund is in deficit from income tax cuts.
C) Most income tax cut benefits go to richer people.
So if someone argues that trust fund doesn't exist, they are arguing that revenue from payroll taxes should finance tax cuts for those richer than them. Effectively transferring money from poor to rich.
Keep this in mind as the Social Security caterwauling starts to increase around 2019 (when SS is expected to start needing money from the trust fund). People will argue that Social Security needs to be cut because of that deficit. Most of those people know better and are being intellectually dishonest.
2034 is the actual challenge, but again, there are reasonable fixes to that - for instance, gradually raising the maximum amount of earnings covered by Social Security, or creating a new residual estate tax and dedicating it to Social Security. Democrats also like the idea of raising the upper limit, which will also work and is an easier sell but less defensible philosophically.
B) Not true or relevant.
B) Not true or relevant.
>So if someone argues that trust fund doesn't exist, they are arguing that revenue from payroll taxes should finance tax cuts for those richer than them. Effectively transferring money from poor to rich.
Again, not true at all. Notice how you can't actually answer the question I posed about how SS can actually get the money out of the trust "fund." The fund is empty and is quite literally only made of a IOUs from the general fund.
It's actually a lousy question because it proves nothing. Money is held in different accounts not because they are actually stored in physically different places, but because they are conceptually different, and because the concepts are not fungible. I do not (and in some cases cannot) transfer money between some of my different accounts at my brokerage even though all that money is ultimately in the same pool somewhere.
In the case of the general fund and the trust fund, the trust fund surplus money was not spend in the 90s or at any other time since the surplus started growing again; it remained in surplus, and - counting its interest income - it remains in growing surplus until about 2019, at which point that surplus starts being dipped into until 2034.
(Also note that historically, this has already happened. [1] There was a social security surplus, and then it got spent down partially in the late 70s, and then started growing again in the early 80s. Everyone got their checks.)
Why is this distinction necessary? Again, because the general fund has gone into deficit. People like mason240 try to pretend that it hasn't gone into deficit as much as it has, because the people that are advantaged by the general fund deficit have a higher tax base than the people that have paid into payroll tax (on average). So why do we make this distinction? To protect against the transfer of money from the poor to the rich. Why do people like mason240 insist otherwise? For not other reason than to keep that money, and to weaken social security.
