The Myth of "Them" Borrowing (or Stealing) From Social Security

You hear it all the time, even if the villains change depending on who's telling the story. The myth that the Social Security Trust Fund will soon be insolvent because "they" borrowed (or stole) from it without ever paying it back. 

I've addressed this before by trying to explain how Social Security Benefits are financed, but this time I'll start with how the government itself is financed. 

In virtually any year the United States Government functions by way of deficit spending. This means that the amount that the government plans to spend in any given year exceeds what is being taken in by way of taxes. The difference is made up by borrowing. This doesn't mean that the Treasury goes to the bank and applies for a loan - on the contrary the United States Treasury issues bonds and other securities which are purchased by individuals, financial institutions and even foreign nationals and governments. These instruments have a term at the end of which the holder redeems it for the purchase price plus interest. Once a budget is approved by Congress and signed by the president, the additional debt is approved. Politicians often argue about how this or that program is going to be paid for, and negotiate over cuts in other areas to counter increases, but for all the arguing they still end up having to borrow in order to pay the bills. If Congress or the president wants to start another war, or forgive student loans, or any other expensive proposition they don't really have to borrow or steal from anywhere, especially not the Social Security Trust Fund, they simply authorize a larger deficit for that year, triggering more debt. 

Conservatives blame Democrats for this mythical theft from Social Security, Democrats typically blame George W. Bush for doing it to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But not only did they not need to take any money from the Social Security Trust Fund, but it's not as if the Trust Fund is a vault full of cash or even a bank account. The money that individuals are taxed to fund Social Security are not sequestered away for each worker's future use. It's not "our" money any more. That money that comes out of our paychecks goes to pay for current retirees. When we retire our benefits will be paid for by money taken out of future workers' paychecks. In addition, any surpluses are required by law to be invested in nonmarketable government securities - so there's not even any cash in the Trust Fund for anyone to steal. 

To be fair, in some sense, Congress and/or various presidents have borrowed money from the Trust Fund, but only because that's how it's legally structured. Going back to the concept of deficit spending - if the government has to borrow, i.e. issue Treasury bonds, to cover the deficit each year, wouldn't it make sense for the amount that has to be borrowed from outside sources be reduced by the amount of Social Security surplus that is required to be invested? And the Social Security Trust Fund receives interest from the general fund when those bonds are redeemed by the Trust Fund. The 2.9 trillion dollar Trust Fund balance is the result of decades of surpluses and consists entirely of Treasury bonds. 

Several years ago the amount of benefits being paid out each year exceeded the amount taken in by payroll taxes, so the Trust Fund stopped running surpluses. The Trust Fund balance will be reduced each year by that deficit. The potential insolvency next decade isn't due to the piggy bank getting raided, but because there aren't any more surpluses. Even then, revenue from payroll taxes will be able to cover around 70% of projected benefits each year unless Congress makes other arrangements. 

There aren't any missing funds pilfered by previous presidents or congresses, it's simply a result of the ratio of retirees to workers increasing over the years. 

Trump Chaos

Trump supporters live in a fantasy world. A world where Trump was an effective, competent president. A world where 2017-2020 were idyllic years. Maybe I spend too much time reading Trumpist posts and tweets, and the pro-Trump cult isn't as numerous as it seems, but in the Republican primaries so far, he has garnered the support of at least half of voters in the primaries and caucuses, and the ones who voted for Haley or DeSantis will likely vote for Trump in November. 

Trumpists are adept at rewriting history. Trump's term in office ended with him undermining trust in the electoral system for half the year, capped off with over two months of efforts to overturn the results. Just weeks before the inauguration a crowd of his supporters violently stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the Electoral votes affirming Biden as president. Despite no credible evidence to support these claims, Trumpists, led by Trump himself, are still insisting that the election was "stolen". And they've been gearing up for this year's election by insisting that the Democrats will attempt to "steal" this election as well. 

Trumpists often assert that he was the only president in 20 years (or 30, or 40, depending on the day) to not preside over our country being involved in war. While it's true that he didn't start any new ones (neither did Obama, Clinton, Carter or Reagan) we were still enmeshed in Afghanistan throughout his whole term. We supported the Iraqi Army and the Kurds in the fight to eliminate ISIS. (If we weren't at war, how could he brag that he defeated ISIS?) His sycophants also claim that the world was a safer place and there weren't wars breaking out all over, like in Ukraine, when he was president. Russia had attacking eastern Ukraine in an attempt to annex two majority Russian-speaking provinces; there had always been unrest and violence in Israel regarding Gaza (although not to the current scale). He had a high-ranking Iranian general assassinated. Special Forces operators were killed in Niger. 

Trump, despite his inauguration speech featuring "American carnage" inherited a mostly peaceful, prosperous nation. Employment was rising, the stock market was climbing, inflation was low and there were no threats from without for three years. Metrics that had been climbing steadily as we recovered from the recession that Obama inherited continued to climb. For three years there was no significant crisis for Trump to deal with; he could concentrate on devising insulting nicknames and rage tweeting. When a significant crisis finally arrived on the scene in early 2020 he downplayed it, blamed his predecessor (who had left him a detailed plan for dealing with a pandemic) and, as was his habit, made it all about him. Instead of confidently leading he refused to take any role in attacking the problem, leaving implementation of any Covid strategy to the states, and then criticizing states' actions. He undermined his own team of experts and constantly made rosy predictions (15 cases and it will be gone; when the weather warms up - it will be gone by Easter) and his ignorant suggestion that injecting disinfectant was a possible cure. (Critics often mistakenly misquote him as saying "inject bleach, his supporters jump on this as proof that critics don't know what they're talking about. As if disinfectant injections are somehow better than bleach). To his credit he worked with the pharmaceutical companies to fast track the creation of a vaccine, but set the nation up for ant-vax hysteria by not forcefully promoting vaccinations. He was more focused on the fact that the post-election release of the vaccine meant that he couldn't benefit from it in the November voting. Always about him.   

To be fair, the pandemic was a situation where it would have been virtually impossible to steer a course that would have simultaneously protected public health, children's education and business. No one knew what was going to happen next, and add to the chaos the eruption of protests (and some riots) in the wake of George Floyd's killing. Do we keep businesses open and risk more transmission, or close them and risk people losing their livelihood? There was no right answer, and in retrospect, some of the answers turned out to be harmful. But when you have a narcissist in charge, the public relations optics of solving a problem become more important than actually solving the problem. 

Trump, despite his insistence that he always hired the best people, has a long track record of characterizing people who left his administration as "losers". One thing I noticed about his selection process was that it resembled more a regular job interview, or even a contest, than selecting public servants who will be best for a very important job. In previous administrations you didn't "apply" to be a Cabinet Secretary. You might signal some interest, or your chief of staff might put together some promising possibilities for you. Trump process looked more like a cross between "The Apprentice" and a job fair at the local high school, with him talking about finalists and one again..."losers". The most obvious disability in Trump's process was that he selected for loyalty to him above all else. Of course you want your team to have a sense of loyalty. You can't have your top people trying to undermine you. But the loyalty should be primarily to the country, and to the office of the president. He wasn't the first president to overvalue personal loyalty, but he was so utterly transparent about it, and the loyalty only went one way. 

Trumpists like to mock Democrats by claiming that our main objection to Trump is "mean tweets". It's true that Trump's prolific tweeting was a focus of the opposition. Not because they were simply "mean", but that his tweets, along with his rally rants, were a clear indicator of his mindset. It was in his tweets where he targeted his enemies, literally calling groups like the media "enemies of the people". It was in his tweets where he turned on his former appointees in a storm of insults. It was in his tweets where his thin skin and his inability to admit that even his most far fetched assertions could be wrong. (The storm path Sharpie wasn't on Twitter - but the principle is the same) The tweets told us who he was. He somehow claims that he was a uniter, while his tweets and other public statements indicate clearly that to him, being a unifier means categorizing those who disagree with him as not "true" Americans, so that what he considers the real Americans are united behind him. 

One of the areas where Trump can claim better results than Biden is immigration through the southern border. It is inarguable that the number of illegal crossings and asylum claims is significantly higher now than it was under Trump. It is a fact that our system is wholly unprepared for the number of people who want to move here and we simply don't know how to process them. This, however, is not simply a Biden problem, it is a government problem, which currently includes both Democrats and Republicans. Trump and the Republicans seems more interested in the problem continuing in order for it to remain a campaign issue. 

Let's not forget the 91 indictments against Trump and the civil cases he has already lost. Trump voters want you to believe that the various cases against him are a political hit job. That he is being targeted in order to take him off the ballot. This ignores (1) the fact that, even if convicted and in jail he could still be elected president and (2) should we ignore criminal activity just because he's running for president? His defenses in some of these cases give you tremendous insight into his thinking. He thinks he can declassify documents  just by thinking about them, that he has immunity for any otherwise illegal acts, that overturning an election is part of his official duties. The things he has been indicted for are actions that he committed in broad daylight, there's no question that he did what he did, meanwhile the Republicans are searching frantically, with no success, for anything that Biden did that would warrant impeachment. 

The battle cry of the Trump camp, lifted from Ronald Reagan, is to ask "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?" I am. For one I'm not concerned that I'm going to catch some deadly disease and die. I'm aware of inflation, but I'm spending around the same amount for groceries every month than I did 4 years ago. Rent has gone up, but so has my pay rate. Personally, things are about the same. I'm not confident that Biden makes the right decisions all the time. But I'm more confident that he thinks about what is best for the country, while Trump only thought about what was best for Trump.

Immigration

The Congressional Tinfoil Hat Caucus has found a martyr in Laken Riley, a young woman who was killed recently, allegedly by a man who, the Trump brigade likes to point out, had entered the country illegally.  While it is true that Ms. Riley in particular would still be alive if it were not for the policies that allowed her killer to remain in the country, it is disingenuous to act as if murders do not occur every day by people who were born here and come from a variety of backgrounds. Or to pretend that anything more than a tiny portion of immigrants, no matter how they entered the country, commit any crimes, let alone murder.  The Trumpublicans are using the tragedy to make their own candidate look like a better alternative. 

Is our immigration system "broken"? There's not much argument from any quarter that something needs to change. However, it's often politically advantageous for the out-of-power party for there to be a broken system, which is why bipartisan agreements rarely happen. In our current political climate it's not so much the process that is under attack, but the fact of immigration itself. In other words, Right Wing opposition comes in the form of a fear of "the other" supplanting our culture. In 2016 Candidate Trump characterized immigration from Mexico and Central America as "They're not sending you their best...They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists". This is the point of view of many in the U.S. - that immigrants, no matter how they get here, are the problem. Anti-immigration rhetoric often focusses on how recent immigrants cling to their homeland's culture and language instead of assimilating. But they don't understand that by the second or third generation they do assimilate. A few years ago the company I worked for held a seminar called Spanish for Retailers. The presenter was the son of Mexican immigrants. He told of how his parents spoke very little English, that he was bilingual, but his daughter did not speak Spanish. This mirrored my own experience growing up in a New York neighborhood with a lot of Italian-Americans. The matriarch of the family spoke mainly Italian. Her son, of my parents' generation, spoke both English and Italian, while the grandson spoke no Italian at all. Immigrant families eventually become American. 

Another trope that is common among the anti-immigrant crowd is "my grandparents came here the right way". The problem with that thinking is that, unless you were coming from a country from which immigration was barred, there weren't a lot of hoops that you had to go through to be allowed in. Saying that the qualifications for admittance were being white and free of tuberculosis is not that far off. I've got at least one ancestor who would not have passed a background check if such a thing had been done a century ago. 

President Biden was criticized for referring to non-citizens as "illegals" in his State of the Union speech. He was then criticized by the other side for "apologizing" to Laken Riley's alleged killer for calling him an illegal. (Biden didn't "apologize" - in an interview he corrected himself and said that his use of that term was inaccurate). There is a tendency among anti-immigrants to call anyone who has not completed the long process of applying for a Green Card, or is here on a student or other temporary visa, an "illegal", or an "illegal alien". But are they really here illegally? The first thing to remember is that under current U.S. law, one may claim asylum simply by presenting oneself to a Border Patrol officer or other immigration official, regardless of how they entered. If someone crosses the Rio Grande, or hops a fence, once they have requested asylum their status is no different from an asylum seeker who came in through an official Port of Entry. They are here legally according to U.S. law. But here's where the problem gets worse. If you're claiming asylum, you have to convince a judge that you have a credible claim. Wait times for an asylum hearing can take 3-10 years, depending on whether the claim is made thorough the Justice Department's immigration court or the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. There is currently a backlog of 2 million applicants with only around 650 immigration judges and 800 asylum officers to handle all those cases. 

This backlog results in the asylum seekers putting down roots in American towns and becoming a part of their communities. They have children who were either born here or were toddlers when their parents arrived. If they are denied asylum, they are understandably unwilling to uproots their American lives and return to their home countries - it's then when they truly are here illegally. But who can blame them? Who wouldn't do everything in their power to make a better, safer, life for their family? 

What would motivate someone to uproot their family from the land where their ancestors have lived for generations to go to a country where they would have to learn not only a new language, but a whole new way of doing things? No one does this so they can marginally improve their lot in life. No, the violence and poverty that many of these immigrants have endured make the dangerous trek to the United States the logical option. Isolationists in the this country want us to draw back into our borders and ignore what is happening in the rest of the world. But the truth is that what happens in the rest of the world affects us. Violence and poverty and political upheaval spur migrations. What can we do to alleviate these conditions in other countries? If your neighbors house is on fire, doesn't that constitute a danger to you? Foreign aid is money that ultimately benefits us here in this country.

So what do we do? I'm not opposed to building border barriers. My main objection to Trump's "Wall" was not that I thought our borders should be porous, but that it wasn't a plan, it was a campaign applause line,  and was ultimately based on his characterization of most immigrants as "not their best people". We've also seen that walls, no matter how high, can be breached and that people can be very imaginative and persistent about getting around, over or under them. We can change the asylum laws and refuse to allow more than a trickle of asylum claims - but I imagine all that will do is encourage people to not turn them selves in to Border Patrol, but to keep their heads down and hope they don't get caught. Or do what Texas is doing and refusing to entertain any asylum claims and turn everyone back. Does Governor Abbott really believe that little park on the river is the only crossing point? We definitely need to expand our capacity for processing asylum seekers. How many judges and asylum officers would it take to reduce the wait time to days or weeks, other than months? What about expanding the reasons that we allow immigration? If someone has held down a job and stayed out of trouble for a year, expedite their application and let them continue to be productive members of the community. On the flip side, any criminal activity should result in immediate deportation, or at least detention until the facts are determined. 

Until sane and practical long-term solutions are enacted there will always be a "crisis at the border". For those who pine for the days of Trump's "closed border" - wasn't it he who declared a National Emergency at the southern border so that he could divert funds to pay for a few miles of his "Big, Beautiful, Mexico-Paid-For Wall"? Or was constantly crying about "caravans"? I concede the numbers are larger now, but the problem isn't one that appeared ex nihilo, and isn't exclusively a Democratic problem. And it will continue to be a problem as long as it's used as a political football.