re: #68 Targetpractice, Worst of Both Worlds

The Social Security Trust Fund was made part of the General Fund during the Great Society. Then SS taxes were raised in ‘83, to create a surplus for the inevitable flood of retiring Baby Boomers, only for it to be looted in varying degrees by Bush Sr, Clinton, Dubya, and now Obama. Dubya particularly hollowed out the surplus to pay for the “Tax Cuts for the Rich” and the War on Terror.

Like I say, if you could provide links, you’d not only help me, but help the Wiki.

en.wikipedia.org
The 1983 Amendments and the Social Security Trust Fund

The 1983 Amendments also included a provision to exclude the Social Security Trust Fund from the unified budget (In political jargon, it was proposed to be taken “off-budget.”[citation needed] Yet today Social Security is treated like all the other trust funds of the Unified Budget.[citation needed] It is a political way[citation needed] of using a cash budget instead of the more appropriate[citation needed] accrual budget, for all the budgets in the U.S. government. It is a way of disguising total debt.[citation needed](Source: Webb, Roy, (1991). “The Stealth Budget: Unfunded Liabilities of the Federal Government,” Economic Review (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond), 77,2 May/June.) This provision also provided for the exemption of Social Security and portions of the Medicare trust funds from any general budget cuts beginning in 1993.[45] This change was one way of trying to protect Social Security funds for the future.

As a result of these changes, particularly the tax increases, the Social Security system began to generate a large short-term surplus of funds, intended to cover the added retirement costs of the “baby boomers.” Congress invested these surpluses into special series, non-marketable U.S. Treasury securities held by the Social Security Trust Fund. Under the law, the government bonds held by Social Security are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Because the government had adopted the unified budget during the Johnson administration, this surplus offsets the total fiscal debt, making it look much smaller[citation needed]. There has been significant disagreement over whether the Social Security Trust Fund has been saved, or has been used to finance other government programs and other tax cuts.