Cat Food On Milk Bones

The Fraud at the Heart of Social Security

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"To understand the fraud at the heart of the Social Security Trust Fund, we start with a very simple fact: cash can only be spent once.
There are two frauds at the very heart of the Social Security system, and I am going to describe and source them in detail. After spending a number of hours poring over public data from the Social Security Administration (SSA), The U.S. Treasury and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and additional hours searching the Web for other published analyses, I can state with some authority that there are no published analyses or accounts of Social Security which incorporate the actual outlays and receipts from fiscal year 2010 in a context which includes the Social Security Trust Fund.
In other words, all published analyses are based either on SSA or CBO estimates, not the actual numbers from the Treasury, and all media reports I could find are simply cut-and-paste repetitions of these estimates. I cannot find a single source which provided any evidence of digging through the data and assembling a coherent picture of the Social Security system.
The media simply repeats "conclusions" published by "official sources" based on estimates, not facts. The laziness this implies is staggering. Meanwhile, pundits such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, however knowledgeable and talented they may be, have obviously never performed a single minute of original data collection and analysis of the voluminous public accounts available to anyone with a computer and web browser.
If this is the best our most prestigious pundits and media resources can manage, then we truly are in dire straits.
All claims that Social Security is "secure for decades" are based on bogus fantasy-estimates, as are claims that the Trust Fund is anything but a carefully contrived fraud. I am rather shocked--and I don't shock that easily--that it comes down to me, the classic independent-journalist "blogger in old blue jeans" to actually assemble the data and draw the simple common-sense conclusions which reveal Social Security as a fraud with two components: the bogus estimates, and the bogus Trust Fund."