FCC warns US broadcasters their licenses are a privilege, not a right

It was earmarked for the retirement of the Baby Boomers. They're taking it now. It will run out around the time that the majority of baby boomers are dead.

That was the plan all along. They knew that the Baby Boom would be followed by a Baby Bust, so the Boomers set aside a retirement fund for themselves. They didn't exactly publicize that, but there's no point in a Trust Fund that goes on forever. If that had been the goal they would have stuck with a pay-as-you-go plan.

Oh, and it's so much worse than that. They didn't actually set the money aside. They spent it, which is why government spending has tripled. (That's in inflation-adjusted terms. It's 12 times as much in nominal terms.) And they gave themselves tax breaks, which don't benefit younger people who haven't had time to accumulate wealth to tax.

All in all, it was very explicitly a scam to transfer money from young people to the wealthy. That wasn't a secret.

The "secret", such as it is, is that they wanted you to believe that those wealthy people would use that money build factories and create jobs and otherwise increase the economy. Which it did, a little -- barely better than inflation. So now it's "oops, we borrowed a bunch of money on the promise to pay it back with interest, except there's no interest and we can't really pay all of it back". The "secret" is that they knew it was a lie all along, but it was a pretty open secret.