Social Security and medicare are self funded via payroll taxes and aren't part of the federal budget. So that's like saying your health insurance premiums and 401K contributions are part of the federal budget, which is obviously ridiculous.
No, social security still is in surplus (the general budget owes it money because congress borrowed it). A lot of the money that is classified as "federal debut" is owed to social security (which is why we are in a situation where the USA owes a lot of federal debt to the USA).
In 2030 something, it will run out of surplus and become insolvent without actual injections from the general budget or via some other change, like removing the applicable income cap. Then you can say "SS is accounting fiction, I told you so", but in 2023 you can't say that yet.
Because SS and medicare are paid for via specific payroll taxes labelled as such on your paycheck (rather than any other tax levied by the government), the books have always been kept separate.
I'm curious if you could expand on what you mean about it being an accounting fiction. I've never seen anything that didn't show it would be fine without funds getting siphoned out of it.
I mean it doesn’t have an independent legal existence. You pay social security taxes to the federal government and the government pays out social security checks. It’s only political rhetoric that connects the two. At any time congress can alter anything about the system.
If your social security tax payments created a legally vested property right in some account, protected by the due process clause, then it would be a different situation—-not an accounting fiction.
Since it is the government, anything at that level would still be at the whims of, the government. Such that I don't really see your point? Are you wanting it to be argued that they'd have to pass a resolution to change whether or not they can use the funds? Isn't that basically what already happened?
You could argue that it could have been done in a different way, but the odds are silly high that that wouldn't have changed anything. Budgetary spend and allocation is controlled by congress, such that it would have only changed the nature of the resolution.
More, you would just be changing the nature of the "fiction." Akin to saying the federal reserve is separate from the government. I mean, yeah, but it is also established by the government. And I expect that winds of the controlling party would blow it about as well as it does the EPA and such.
The website is fine, it is your use of it that is wrong. From where I stand, those errors have been well-documented by other commenters, so I don't know that further writing on the subject is necessary. Or perhaps you have a more thorough rebuttal to what was a reasonable comment.
