War Money Is Real; Social Security Money Is Fake

Railing Against Reform (Insight Magazine)

By Edwin J. Feulner

In which the president of the Heritage Foundation, which has strategized for nearly two decades to deconstruct Social Security, tells us all about the make-believe money that is in the Social Security trust fund.

Unfortunately, that assumes Social Security can really rely on the trust fund to pay benefits. There are billions of dollars worth of IOUs in the fund, but no real money.

Remember, Social Security is currently taking in more than it spends, and it will keep doing so until 2018. So even if we increase the surplus going to the trust fund today, it doesn't matter. The government can't simply store up a pile of cash in a bank account. It will just use the extra money to buy even more government bonds, and it will spend the money to build roads, fund Medicare and pay bureaucrats.

Squanderers! Actually, I'm all for road building, Medicare funding, and even bureaucrat paying (as long as they don't misfile my paperwork). But President Feulner overlooked a few items. Like nearly $200 billion for the Iraq War ($9 billion of which has inexplicably gone missing), more than $40 million to Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraq exile group, and some chump change to Armstrong Williams (a mere quarter million) and other paid administration propagandists.

I wonder just how many retirements could be comfortably funded with $200,040,250,000? That's a lot of early bird dinners at the Country Buffet.