Trusting the Trust Fund
My new op-ed is in today’s Columbia Spectator. It is titled Trusting the Trust Fund.
For the past 20 years, the Social Security system has put away a portion of its yearly revenue into what has effectively become one of the world’s richest bank accounts. This account, called the trust fund, has over 1.5 trillion dollars in assets. The latest Social Security Administration report predicts that the trust fund will only get richer for the next 15 years, and will then have sufficient funds to finance all of Social Security’s promised benefits until roughly 2042. Yet in his State of the Union address, George Bush implied that Social Security’s crisis would begin when it started to spend its savings, not when it ran out of them. “In the year 2027,” he said, “the government will somehow have to come up with an extra 200 billion dollars to keep the system afloat.”
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