Remember the "lockbox" of the 2000 elections?

[karynnj]

One of Al Gore's strongest messages in 2000 was that he wanted to shore up the SS fund.

I was looking for a Greenspan statement that the INTENTIONAL SS surplus was to be saved as treasury bills or treasury IOUs. I still have not found anything from a solid source that I would feel comfortable posting as support. I don't know this site and it seems to be from the Ron Paul end of the spectrum includes an excerpt from a budget committee meeting that gets to the heart of the issue with social security.

What is clear to me is the social security fix in the 1980s ended up being almost a fraud. The FICA taxes, which are far more regressive than income taxes were used by first Reagan, then Bush, then Clinton (and later Bush and Obama) to allow both tax cuts (disproportionately to the wealthy) and spending to increase without Congress having to raise revenue to balance it.

I wonder now if the reason the media was so pro GWB in 2000 - turning any mild Gore flaw into a major issue and whitewashing Bush - might have been that creating the "lockbox" would have burst an additional bubble that might be bigger than the tech bubble and possibly as big as the housing bubble.

I wish the Senate would have listened to former Senator Hollings - and I hope that everyone here will forgive me for using this source, but I can't find a better one.

HOLLINGS: Well, the truth is…ah, shoot, well, we all know there’s Washington’s math problem. Alan Sloan in this past week’s Newsweek says he spends 150%. What we’ve been doing, Mr. Chairman, in all reality, is taken a hundred billion out of the Social Security Trust Fund, transferring it over to the spending column, and spending it. Our friends to the left here are getting their tax cuts, we getting our spending increases, and hollering surplus, surplus, and balanced budget, and balanced budget plans when we continue to spend a hundred billion more than we take in.

That’s the reality, and I think that you and I, working the same side of the street now, can have a little bit of success by bringing to everybody’s attention this is all intended surplus. In other words, when we passed the Greenspan Commission Report, the Greenspan Commission Report only had Social Security in 1983 a two hundred million surplus. It’s projected to have this year a 117 million surplus. I’ve got the schedule, I’ll ask to put in the record the CBO report: 117, 126, 130, 100, going right through to 2008 over the ten year period of 186 billion surplus. That was intended; this is dramatic about all these retirees, the baby boomers. But we foresaw that baby boomer problem, we planned against that baby boomer problem. Our problem is we’ve been spending that particular reserve, that set-aside that you testify to that is so necessary. That’s what I’m trying to get this government back to reality, if we can do that.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/07/were-americas-assets-looted-years-ago.html

Neither extreme view is reasonable. I feel that our government betrayed us when they did this. Yet, all of us benefited to some degree by tax cuts or new programs that were really funded by stealing the SS money. The whole idea of the fund was that the babyboom bulge would create a problem and we were supposedly proactively setting money aside. This should be a very strong reason for why at least part of the solution must be tax increases.