By Elois Zeanah
Social Security Will Be Bankrupt In Two Years (2012)
Alabama Congressman Spencer Bachus, at home during the Congressional recess, reported on August 19th that Social Security will be bankrupt within two years – many years before government has been reporting. This is a crisis! Why are the President and Congress not heralding fixing Social Security instead of overhauling a health care system that’s works well but needs tweaks? As Congressman Bachus stated: “If a Social Security bailout is needed it will invaribly have an impact on government health-care programs.”
Social Security Is a Far Greater Threat than Health Care Reform In reality, only 3% of Americans don’t have access to health care who want it. The 47 million number of uninsured Americans quoted by President Obama and Congressional Democrats is fiction.
- The largest uninsured group is made up of people who have access to either Medicaid or S-CHIP but choose not to take it.
- The next largest uninsured group is illegal aliens.
- The third largest group consists of people who make at least $75, 000 a year and choose not to enroll.
- That leaves a few million people.
ObamaCare proposes to destroy a healthcare system that works well but needs tweaks to get costs down and make it more efficient and make insurance accessible to those with pre-existing conditions. What sense does it make to create a new system, that will have its own unknown and unintended consequences, for the purpose of forcing 97% of Americans into a social experiment to help 3% of the population? We should definitely tweak the healthcare system to:
- get rid of Medicare and Medicaid fraud and abusive medical lawsuits;
- change federal laws that prevent interstate competition among insurance companies and choice for patients;
- find a way to make insurance policies portable from job to job and deal with pre-existing conditions; and
- plug loopholes in federal laws that allow illegal aliens to get free health care that causes hospitals to close and insurance premiums to rise.
But all this and other needed reforms can be done without the government taking control of our health care, putting government bureaucrats between patients and doctors, and triggering trillions more in deficits.
The Social Security Crisis Involves Greater Numbers than the Uninsured
“About 160 million workers are earning Social Security protection, and about 52 million people receive retirement, survivors and disability benefits from Social Security.”[1] And approximately 77 million baby boomers are scheduled for retirement. Far more millions of people will be impacted by the Social Security crisis than by the health care crisis.
Furthermore, how can we trust government to manage our “health insurance” after Congress stole our “retirement insurance”? In fact, many of the problems with our current healthcare system are caused by the government in the first place – just as problems with Social Security were caused by government not keeping promises to the pubic.
Government Broke Promises Regarding Social Security
When the Social Security Trust Fund was created, government promised that participation in Social Security would be entirely voluntary, that payments to the “Trust Fund” would only be used to fund their Social Security retirement, and no other government program, and that annuity payments would never be taxed as income. Every one of these promises has been broken.
Congress confiscates our Social Security funds every month under the pretense that workers’ payroll taxes (FICA) for Social Security go into a Trust Fund for us to draw in retirement. In truth, there is no trust fund. Congress never set aside the trillions of dollars of surplus funds (over what is needed to pay immediate retirement benefits), but spends the cash immediately. There is no pile of money somewhere that can be used to pay Social Security benefits – instead, it’s just a computerized ledger somewhere that says “IOU” to future Social Security recipients. That’s it.
To date, Congress has stolen and spent more than $11 trillion of our Social Security taxes that were supposed to be set aside in a trust fund to pay for our retirement. In addition to raiding the Social Security Trust Fund every month, Congress continues to add costly programs under Social Security that sap money away from “retirement insurance”. And government keeps adding liabilities to Social Security, such as giving immigrants who had never paid into the system Social Security benefits once they reach 65.
President Obama and Congressional leaders are working on as big a hoax in their proposal for a government takeover of our private health care insurance. And if they succeed, there will be no accountability – just as there is no accountability with the raiding of our FICA taxes.
[1] Social Security Administration, SSA Publication No. 05-10055, August 2009,