The Mythology Of Borrowing And Stealing From Social Security

There is a level of crazy in the Social Security debate that is simply not healthy for the nation.  We have reached the point where the sound of the sound bite is more important than the facts underneath it.

Governor Christie in an effort to shutdown Mike Huckabee in the recent GOP debate invoked the crazy card.  He said, "The lying and stealing has already occurred. The Trust Fund is filled with IOUs.” He subsequently followed this statement with a plea for political honesty with the public. Are you kidding me?

Every candidate is entitled to his own opinion, but today candidates simply make up facts that fit their sound bite. Christies’ statement is classified by the Social Security Administration as Urban Legend. He isn't lying. He is wrong.

So we have left the realm of reason and entered Crazytown. And, Crazytown has a large voting block.  Consider that the following quote has drawn 50,000 likes and 500,000 shares.

 “Next time a Republican tells you that ‘Social Security is broke,’ remind them that Pres. Bush ‘borrowed’ $1.37 trillion of Social Security surplus revenue to pay for his tax cuts for the rich and his war in Iraq and never paid it back.” ~ Occupy Democrats

PolitiFact conidered this quote, and rated it as “Mostly False.” That is of course a polite rating. It is “Stir Crazy”, and 500,000 people took time out of their day to share lunacy. Make no mistake, Governor Christie wants to tap into the energy of Crazytown for his campaign.

Every President since Kennedy has been accused of stealing money from Social Security. There isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that any program money has been misused. I have seen people accuse Ford and Carter of stealing money, and their budgets actually subsidized the system. 

I have written previously on LBJ, who draws the ire of conservatives. Bush draws serves as a lightning rod for liberals. The story is all the same, where the name of the thief varies based on the ideology of the author. The story is noise.

PolitiFact’s article is right on a number of things. It correctly points out that the current surplus stems from changes made in 1983.  Also the process of borrowing the money hasn’t changed since the inception of the system. Between the two, we are borrowing more money under a process that dates back to the 1930s.

By law, the excess cash of Social Security is converted into government securities, and, yes, the cash is used by the Treasury to pay for government expenses.  This is no different from a private pension that buys Treasury obligations.  The only difference is that no one at these private pensions complains about the theft, questions the IOUs, or worries about the repayment of the bonds.  Why? Because these investment professionals aren’t crazy.

The article is specifically incorrect about the repayment of bonds.  It says: “As for not ‘paying back’, the bonds won’t need to be repaid until 2020.” This is nutty. The bonds held by the Social Security Trust Fund have specific maturity dates.  On those dates, the Treasury refinances the maturing bonds with new loans under new terms from the Social Security Trust Fund.

To be clear, it is factually wrong to say that no one pressed Bush for payment on the money borrowed by the government.  It is factually wrong to say that the money borrowed by the Bush administration hasn’t been repaid with interest. Much of the money that was borrowed by the Bush administration has been repaid by loans made from Social Security to the Obama administration.

It is more accurate to say that we will need to find a new source of refinancing in the next few years.  CBO says that it is 2017.  SSA projects it is likely to be 2019. This is a serious problem – one that get no attention in Crazytown.

Governor Christie isn’t lying.  He is simply wrong.  The problems of Social Security have nothing to do with what is in the Trust Fund, and everything to do with the sums that were never put into it.

Today the largest expense in the government’s budget is on auto-pilot, and largely governed by politicians trolling Crazytown for votes. No one really should be surprised if that mix falls into crisis.