by Plantagenet » Tue 22 Nov 2016, 21:03:00
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'a')ctually I'm not all that concerned with the trust fund, tweaking it here and there should keep it going fine.
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There is no social security trust fund.
Benefits paid by SS come from taxes paid by current workers.
Currently workers don't pay enough taxes to cover all SS benefits, so the US government pays the rest from general income taxes. But income taxes are inadequate to cover all US govemrent spending, so the extra money has to be borrowed from China etc. The current shortfall in SS taxes is about 250 BILLION, so that extra money has to come from income taxes and borrowing. That number will get much much bigger as the number of SS beneficiaries grows.
Going forward the amount of SS taxes paid by current workers will cover less and less of the needed money for SS payments. One way to visualize this is to take the amount of money in the imaginary trust fund and then "deplete" this money by adding up all the income tax money that would have to be spent to pay SS benefits.

If there was a social security trust fund it would be completely exhausted in about 17 years. But in reality there is no social security trust fund.