im not fucking with this guy, i think he is a secret government spy who is going to recruit one of us to drive a fake bomb into the RG
Payroll taxes weren't used to fund retirement plans they've always paid for the normal operations of the Federal government.
I don't think this is exactly right. Payroll taxes are supposed to be put in trust fund accounts, and those accounts used to pay benefits. Because the money is managed through trust funds, the executors of the programs can spend them as necessary - without congress approving a spending bill.
I thought it had become a national ID number, which to my understanding was never the original intent.
What is supposed to be done in theory and what has actually happened are very different. In the 80’s Reagan and the Democrats passed massive overhauls to federal tax revenue, these were called “tax cuts” but in total they were revenue neutral. The “tax cuts” reduced progressive income tax revenue but increased regressive payroll tax revenue. That payroll tax revenue isn’t sitting in a bank account waiting to pay workers who retire. It has been spent to fund the everyday operations of the US government.
The payroll tax revenue is mostly spent on benefit payments. What bank would the govt. keep its surplus money in? What does this bank do with the deposited money? The trust funds are required by law, and always have (as far as I know), to invest their surpluses in US treasuries because they are the safest investment, guaranteed by the federal government. A side effect of this is that the money from the bond sales goes into the general treasury and gets spent. Another side effect of this is that when the bonds come due, the govt. has to pay them off from the general treasury so some spending is squeezed out. Not a problem when the trust funds are in surplus. But they're not in surplus anymore. They weren't in surplus when Reagan and Tip O'Neil got together and put SS on a track where it wouldn't run out of money for decades to come. What did change was that the trust funds used to be accounted for "off book" and we put on the books. This removed the distorted picture of what the govt. as a whole was really taking in and spending.
No, what changed was that Reagan started rolling the enormous deficit snowball downhill, and only Clinton could stop it. Republicans always hated Social Security, and Reagan discovered that spending it was the way to destroy it.
