If you really want it hammered home into your head just how ephemeral the Social Security Trust Fund really and truly is, take a look at what one of the most colorful and nearly-unintelligible US senators ever, Senator Ernest 'Fritz' Hollings of South Carolina, had to say about it on October 13, 1989, 22 years ago:
(We used to have to translate Senator Hollings' old school Charleston, South Carolinian dialect to some of our Northern friends in Congress even though we hardly could understand what he was saying most of the time either)
"The public fully supported enactment of hefty new Social Security taxes in 1983 to ensure the retirement program’s long-term solvency and credibility. The promise was that today’s huge surpluses would be set safely aside in a trust fund to provide for baby-boomer retirees in the next century.
Well, look again. The Treasury is siphoning off every dollar of the Social Security surplus to meet current operating expenses of the government…
(T)he most reprehensible fraud in this great jambalaya of frauds is the systematic and total ransacking of the Social Security trust fund...
The hard fact is that in the next century…the American people will wake up to the reality that those IOUs in the trust fund vault are a 21st century version of Confederate banknotes.”
Well, look again. The Treasury is siphoning off every dollar of the Social Security surplus to meet current operating expenses of the government…
(T)he most reprehensible fraud in this great jambalaya of frauds is the systematic and total ransacking of the Social Security trust fund...
The hard fact is that in the next century…the American people will wake up to the reality that those IOUs in the trust fund vault are a 21st century version of Confederate banknotes.”
‘Confederate banknotes’. You know what they were worth at the end of the War Between the States, The War of Northern Aggression or The Civil War, whatever you choose to call it?
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