If the Social Security Trust Fund was spent, was it stolen?

The most reprehensible fraud…
is the systematic and total ransacking of the Social Security trust fund…
the Social Security payroll tax has become a money machine
for the US  Treasury
generating fantastic revenue surpluses
in excess of the costs of the Social Security program…

The public fully supported enactment
of hefty new Social Security taxes in 1983
to ensure the retirement program’s long-term solvency and credibility

The promise was that today’s huge surpluses would be set safely aside
in a trust fund to provide for baby-boomer retirees in the next century

Well, look again

The Treasury is siphoning off every dollar of the Social Security surplus
to meet current operating expenses…

By thus reducing the deficit
we mask the true enormity of the Federal budget crisis
while creating the illusion that Congress and the administration
are actually doing something about deficits…

The hard fact is…the Social Security system
will find itself  paying out vastly more in benefits than it is taking in…
and the American people will wake up to the reality
that those IOU’s in the trust fund vault
are a 21st century version of Confederate banknotes

Of course, the Treasury would have the option of raising taxes
to repay the astronomical sums we have borrowed from the trust fund

But that would be a brazen rip off of working Americans...

Any way you slice it, it is a lousy public policy
to borrow… from the trust fund with no credible plan for reimbursement

…this approach allows us to mask the true scale of the…deficit
thus making it easier for us politicians to sit on our hands

Fritz Hollings
US Senate, October 13, 1989