How come the government can take money out of Social Security and spend it?

[B.Kevorkian]

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.