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+--- Thread: How come the government can take money out of Social Security and spend it? (/thread-51508.html)
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How come the government can take money out of Social Security and spend it? - jonesw03 - 12-16-2012 03:15 AM
We pay Social Security so we can get a retirement and etc. How come the government can dip into it without penalty. Shouldn't it be locked for what it's supposed to be used for only? The government is going after businesses why are they able to do the same thing others are getting punished for?
- GoGo Girls - 12-16-2012 03:23 AM
Because Jimmy Carter put social security into the general fund to balance the budget and its been used as the politicians petty cash drawer ever since.
- patriotwww - 12-16-2012 03:23 AM
Good question. Not sure how they can do that, but it certainly needs to be fixed!
- Cesc - 12-16-2012 03:23 AM
That is not exactly how it works, but anyway, you may call it stealing.
- rushville1006 - 12-16-2012 03:23 AM
Because they do not truly have the best interest of the people in mind.
- ggates1982 - 12-16-2012 03:23 AM
social security is actually oasdi which stands for old age,survivors, disability insurance basically it is an insurance policy now u can borrow cash against some policies and some insurance companies can dip into the same cash reserve and invest it for their profit as long as it doesnt mess with ur benefits the last time i checked everyone who was eligible for benefits was getting them
- deiracefan_219 - 12-16-2012 03:23 AM
Because the Government thinks and acts as though they're "above the law".
We the Ppl are at the Governments mercy and we dare not question why they do the things they do.......
- B.Kevorkian - 12-16-2012 03:23 AM
The idea of getting the same money you put into SS back out has never been valid. As a pay-as-you-go ponzi scheme, SS has long used it's current, regressive, tax reciepts to fund it's current retirees. The fiction that collecting even more money and 'saving' some of it would somehow make the burden of later payouts less is just that, a fiction. Consumption by future retirees will come out of future production, the burden is the same whether the money sits in a lock box or is invested. Actually, it's worse if it isn't invested, since investment now can increase future production.
What the government does is 'invest' the SS fund in government bonds. That means there will be more money in the fund, later, because it recieves the interest from those bonds. That money, though, comes out of the general fund, so, in reality, what's happenign isn't that SS is being raided, it's that future tax revenues are being raided to keep SS solvent.
- PIRATE - 12-16-2012 03:23 AM
They call it "borrowing"
- Crash - 12-16-2012 03:23 AM
it used actually be a separate fund, Lyndon Johnson was the first president to borrow from it to pay for his great society programs & the viet nam war. he was only able to do this because he had a congress & senate controled by his own party. after that there was no way to pay it back with out greatly increasing taxes so everyone after him just continued to use as a general fund. now its such a large part of the governments income that we would have to shut down all gov. programs for at least 2 years to pay it back so they just use taxes to pay the interest on the loan & nothing on the principal