Rick Perry Was Correct

That revelation, which was greeted with a ho-hum by the media, basically announced that by 2033, 21 years from now, the so-called Social Security trust fund will be empty. The only reason this was even announced is because we are approaching a presidential election campaign, and in response to Perry's much-derided claim, the government's actuaries, who originally told the Obama administration and the public that the fund would be solvent until 2036, re-examined their numbers and concluded that it will be in the red three years earlier than they thought.

This revelation should come as no surprise to those who monitor the government and its deceptive ways. When he first introduced Social Security, President Franklin D. Roosevelt argued that under Social Security the federal government would be holding your money for you. He deceptively fostered the idea that Social Security would be a savings account, into which employees and employers would make contributions and out of which guaranteed monies would be paid to those who reached the age of 65. Essentially, he claimed that you'd get your money back.

The politicians believed him, but the actuaries and the judiciary understood that the government would never hold anyone's money for him -- as if it were the custodian of a bank account. In the first of several challenges to the constitutionality of Social Security, the Supreme Court found that the Social Security fund did not consist of your money. It was merely tax revenue.

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It also held that since Congress' law-making authority is limited to the 16 discrete delegated powers granted to it in the Constitution (a truism few in Congress accept as binding) but its spending authority is open-ended (a conclusion that must torment James Madison's ghost), Congress could collect funds, claim it was holding the funds in a savings account and then spend those funds as it saw fit -- for those in need after age 65 or for any other purpose.

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And, in a curious yet revealing one-liner in the Supreme Court opinion upholding the constitutionality of Social Security, even the court recognized that there would be no trust fund in the traditional sense when it found that the tax dollars collected and supposedly designated for Social Security were "not earmarked in any way."

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