National Debt And Social Security

The Republicans (especially the teabaggers among them) are currently making a big deal of the national debt. They have tried to paint a picture of our debt being mostly owned by foreign countries, especially China -- and they have inferred that this would mean we are being "bought" or "owned" by China. That is an outrageous lie! As you can see from the graphic above, all of the foreign countries who have American debt (i.e., they have bought American government bonds) only hold about 1/3 of that total debt -- and the Chinese only have about 20% of the debt own by foreigners.

The truth is that the large majority of the debt owed by the U.S. government is owed to the American people, the Federal Reserve, and several federal Trust Funds. And the largest owner of our debt is the Social Security Trust Fund. The government has borrowed more than $2.7 trillion from the Social Security Trust Fund. That money was never supposed to be used for anything but Social Security payments to retirees, but the government has borrowed it to pay for many other things.

Now the government, especially the Republicans, don't want to have to pay that money back (because they would probably have to raise taxes to do so, especially on the rich). This is why they want to cut Social Security benefits. Every dollar they can cut from Social Security benefits is a dollar they won't have to pay back (a dollar they can keep using for other purposes, like funding the bloated defense budget).

As an American citizen who has been paying into the Social Security Trust Fund for nearly 50 years, I am angry and disgusted at the Republican efforts to cut benefits. I want every single dollar owed to the Social Security Trust Fund to be paid back -- and then I want them to stop raiding that fund for their own pork-barrel projects. I consider their efforts to cut Social Security benefits to be theft (stealing retirement money from me and millions of other American citizens).

Then, if after paying that money back, other funds are needed to insure the future of Social Security, simply raise the cap on the amount of income subject to the payroll tax (currently about $110,000). This would not affect low income or middle class Americans at all. It would just insure that wealthy Americans pay their fair share. And it would sustain the Social Security system far into the future -- at current benefit levels plus inflation.

The president and the Democrats should take cuts to Social Security benefits off the table completely. They should never have been a part of the current deficit and debt debate anyway, since Social Security has never contributed a penny to raising the deficit or the national debt.