Issue Position: Social Security

Issue Position

Nothing is more important than the promise of Social Security to senior citizens. We have an obligation, a duty, to protect what has been promised, and what has been promised over decades is the security of Social Security. We must provide better accounting for the Social Security Trust Fund; we can do that by taking it "off-budget" or putting it in a "lock box" where it cannot be touched by the next Congress or any Congress after that. This separate accounting for Social Security would, some experts agree, enhance the long-term survival of Social Security as we know it. (At present, the accounting method for Social Security does not maintain a separate bottom-line for the Trust Fund but instead assigns its surplus or deficit to general treasury funds, thus the tendency of Congress over the years to raid the Fund for dollars to spend in general. This is not only bad policy; it is playing with the financial security of those to whom it has been promised.) President Obama's "jobs" speech in September, 2011 should scare all of us; his new "jobs" proposal presents, as one expert wrote, "a vision of spending, of greater compulsory government involvement in civil society and enterprise" and nothing that would protect Social Security. Earlier this year, the President said Social Security might not be able to meet its immediate obligations. American taxpayers paid about $200 billion to the Treasury in August, 2011. As the Washington Examiner's Social Security expert wrote, "Instead of scaring millions of American seniors, Obama could simply instruct his Treasury secretary to pay Social Security benefits from that $200 billion. But Obama won't do that because he would rather use the prospect of no Social Security checks to scare seniors into pressuring Republicans to raise taxes. There is a word for that: demagoguery."

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