Unfortunately, the data doesn't agree with you:
Social Security: 21%
Health: 14%
Medicare: 13%
Income Security: 13%
National Defense: 13%
Ref: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Social Security: 21%
Health: 14%
Medicare: 13%
Income Security: 13%
National Defense: 13%
Ref: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
I suppose you can make some arguments that we make money from military. But it always feels weird to say we need SS cuts when the data equally shows that we don't. Uncap the max on SS tax, and it would look hilariously fine.
If your social security tax payments created a legally vested property right in some account, protected by the due process clause, then it would be a different situation—-not an accounting fiction.
You could argue that it could have been done in a different way, but the odds are silly high that that wouldn't have changed anything. Budgetary spend and allocation is controlled by congress, such that it would have only changed the nature of the resolution.
More, you would just be changing the nature of the "fiction." Akin to saying the federal reserve is separate from the government. I mean, yeah, but it is also established by the government. And I expect that winds of the controlling party would blow it about as well as it does the EPA and such.
In 2030 something, it will run out of surplus and become insolvent without actual injections from the general budget or via some other change, like removing the applicable income cap. Then you can say "SS is accounting fiction, I told you so", but in 2023 you can't say that yet.
Because SS and medicare are paid for via specific payroll taxes labelled as such on your paycheck (rather than any other tax levied by the government), the books have always been kept separate.
They're absolutely part of the budget [1]. They're just not part of the discretionary budget. Defence is the largest discretionary line.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/budget...