Where has lustylad gone?
Is he out looking for the SS/Medicare surplus!
How much money did you find in that account lusty?
Originally Posted by WTF
Looking for me, fagboy? You're beyond help. Each time I point out how sloppy and half-baked your arguments are, you double down on stupid. Then you have the chutzpah to say “look at the big picture” - when you keep missing it completely! I'll give you one last chance. Maybe a lightbulb will go off somewhere in your libtarded brain.
Thirty years ago, we raised payroll taxes so the baby boomers would contribute more earlier toward their retirement. The sooner we start saving, the more is available in our golden years, right? So hard-working people like me and LexusLover (and everyone else not on the dole like you) forked over extra tax dollars to put into those SS and Medicare trust funds.
Now, the people running the trust funds had to figure out what to do with this money. One option was to keep it in DD accounts at various banks. DD accounts earn no interest so that's like holding cash. (As an aside, the banks would be happy to take the money and lend it out to earn interest.) The folks running the trust funds figured it wouldn't look good for the money to sit idle and not grow over time. Why let the banks make money on all this cash instead of having it accrue to the beneficiaries of the trust funds? So they looked around at other options. Then the US Treasury came up with an idea. They said hey, we need to go out and borrow $250 bn to finance this year's federal budget deficit. You have a $50 surplus so why don't you lend it to us? That way, you earn a return on the money and we only have to borrow $200 bn elsewhere. It's a win-win.
So the trust funds started investing the money in US Treasury bonds. To avoid hanky-panky, the bonds are non-marketable and can only be redeemed by the trust funds at maturity. The US Treasury counts these bonds as part of the “gross” national debt but excludes them from the “net” national debt owed to the public. As the baby boomers retire and the trust funds start to be drawn down, the amount of debt held by the trust funds goes down and the debt owed to the public goes up.
Here's what you need to wrap your pea brain around, fagboy - If the trust funds didn't exist, the US Government would have borrowed the money elsewhere to cover its spending plans each year. It's not like Bushie boy wouldn't have been able to fund his “war toys” or whatever else you object to. And the gross national debt would be exactly the same. The only difference is someone else would be collecting the interest instead of the trust funds.
Now, here is a little lesson in why the time value of money matters. In 30 years, a dollar invested at 5% will grow to $4.32. At 8% it will grow to $10.06. At 10% it will grow to $17.45. Given a decent rate of return and a long enough time period, the accrued interest is far more than the original investment. So play with those numbers, fagboy. Still wanna tell us we didn't pay enough into the trust funds to cover our benefits? I didn't think so.
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