The director of OMB said this the other day:

According to the most recent report of the independent Social Security Trustees, the trust fund is currently in surplus and growing. Even though Social Security began collecting less in taxes than it paid in benefits in 2010, the trust fund will continue to accrue interest and grow until 2025, and will have adequate resources to pay full benefits for the next 26 years.

The same guy a decade earlier, via Charles Krauthammer:

The OMB explained that these trust fund “balances” are nothing more than a “bookkeeping” device. “They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits.” In other words, the Social Security trust fund contains — nothing…they are nothing more than “claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures.”

Evidently the more current remarks from Mr. Lew reflect a calculation that the obviously necessary and rather easy fixes to social security are politically toxic. Maybe this is correct. When push comes to shove, however, the straight talkers are likely to look a lot better than those who have spun fantasies all these years.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 12th, 2011 at 4:08 am and is filed under business, Democrats, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.