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Originally Posted by George H.
I found out through members of congress who knew it was happening and didn't like it... Daniel Moynihan and Harry Reid to name a couple.
That money was raised through FICA taxes for a non existent crisis we were told existed in funding Social security at the time and possible worst case scenarios that loomed in the future. It was promptly used for everything else. George W Bush alone used $1.52 trillion of the trust fund from 2001 to 2008.
Money raised for one purpose based on lies and exaggerations and then used for entirely different purposes. That isn't theft?
BTW, I use W only as an example that is easily researched. Every congress and every president from the first day revenue from the Act of 1983 began to roll in has done it.
You don't want to call it theft. Okay. How about scam? It was presented as a plan to save Social Security. It wasn't really meant to save SS and I think Reagan knew that and I am almost sure Greenspan knew that. Both hated Social Security and all social safety net programs if you go by their own historical statements.
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I've tried very hard to find out what happened in 1983 that is striking you as so nefarious. I've researched Moynihan and Reid, as to where they stood on the related issues. Maybe you can give me more specific information on the history, as you followed it.
What I learned is that, in the early '80s, Social Security was, indeed, facing a solvency crisis. Everyone agreed they had to either increase revenues or decrease benefits. What they did, through the Social Security Amendments of 1983, was to solve the immediately threarening cash flow problem and, also, to set revenues high enough - providing enough surplus funds - so that it would be a long time before this problem would come up again.
Yes, that did allow the Social Security trust fund to really bulk up. They could foresee that with the retirement sunami of baby-boomers coming, combined with the relative shrinking of the workforce, related to declining reproductive rate (my grandmother had 11 kids; my mother had 5; I've had none) there would be a very expectable imbalance, eventually, between money coming in and money going out. What they did forestalled that eventuality until the mid 2030s, much to the benefit of baby boomers and post-boomers, like you and me.
Moynihan wanted to only boost up revenue to Social Security just enough to keep it on a pay-as-you-go basis. That would have doomed people my age (age 63) to a horrible political battle with younger Americans over keeping the benefits my age cohort expected. Call me selfish, but I'm glad Moynihan's view did not prevail. He wanted working American's to keep more of their income, so they could invest it in privately held retirement funds. (Who else thinks along those lines?) He died in 2003 and didn't experience the great recession that depleted a lot of privately held wealth. That might have changed his view.