Hacker News Reader

Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

The most important thing is eliminating the annual deficit. That sends more of a signal about the future of the country and it's currency than the total amount of debt.

How it gets done is separate from that. Given that the only demographic that can comfortably weather a recession is also starting to collect social security, paid for by younger generations who would be meaningfully affected by a recession, "old people are scamming us" may actually be an effective message.

View on HN

Social Security is not really relevant to the deficit, that's just a thing some politicians say because they want to dismantle the pie to take their piece. Every time someone points to SS as the source of our fiscal woes, we should be immediately skeptical.

I assume they just want to redirect the required payroll taxes into the stock market via privatization. Currently it goes into the trust fund which buys U.S. treasuries.

https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/ProgData/assets.html

Social Security is 22% of the budget, how is that not relevant to the deficit? It's the largest single category of spending, and spending more than the government takes in is the source of the deficit.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Because it's not real spending, because the money was already put aside. We take more in SS taxes than we pay out - it's a net positive.

It's sort of like looking at the IRS and saying "look how much it costs!"

Payroll taxes are supposed to cover Medicare and Social Security (along with some other programs), but they cover less than 2/3 of those costs. It’s not true that “the money was already put aside”, because retirees these days are getting about triple what they put in, and the ‘pot of money’ saved up to cover Social Security ‘promises’ is forecast to run out. There is an infinite number of ways to juggle the numbers, but the government is spending a lot of money on 'non-discretionary' programs, and revenues are not high enough to support everything.

SS doesn't come out of the general budget, I don't know what to tell you. If you dissolve SS you don't get any money. SS is not being paid out from general budget. That spending has literally nothing to do with the deficit.

People have been saying that SS will run out since the 70s, at least. I've heard it all.

it's not worth arguing with someone who has bought into the SS budgeting fiction, imo. essentially all economists agree with you

Reply on news.ycombinator.com