Talk:Social Security Trust Fund

message: The purpose of articles in wikipedia is to provide reliable information to anyone with a question. It is not for news stories.  Therefore, the paragraph that begins, "this week, the president..."  For that to be appropriate for an article here, the president would be repeating the same speech each and every week.
To ensure that the articles are reliable, wikipedia relies primarily on peer reviewers and editors that insist that original sources be provided for every significant point.  Given sources, editors can seek to provide appropriate balance and tone if you aren't sure how to do so.  And readers can verify the article by referring to the original sources cited.
This is not the forum for advancing points of view.  
Just the facts, please.  Mulp 06:33, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  purpose of wikipedia articles 

message: This statement is incorrect.  First of all government securities are marketable assets, and second it is perfectly legal for a company to invest its pension funds in government securities. 
:Unlike private pension funds, the Social Security Trust Fund does not hold any marketable assets to secure workers' paid-in contributions.  The Social Security Trust Fund "invests" surpluses in United States Treasury bonds and U.S. securities backed "by the full faith and credit of the government".  
:Practically speaking, the federal government has used the Social Security Trust Fund in a way which would be illegal for any private-sector company to do - in order to help balance the federal budget, the government has borrowed money from the Trust Fund to pay current operating expenses and replaced those funds with government IOU's
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This "correction" is incorrect.  It would not be "perfectly legal" for a company to "invest" its pension funds in its own securities - whether they were marketable or not.  Corporate execs go to jail for that sort of chicanery.
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Not true, I worked for a Fortune 100 company that forced all 401K contributions to be in their own stock, there were no other options.
----  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.226.211.90 (talk) 16:22, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: While I appreciate the emotion that many feel on this topic, wikipedia is not a debating forum where opposing views are argued, nor a forum for publishing original research or analysis.  While points of view can be presented, these must be those of others, with appropriate citations, and with opposing positions of similar stature given equal credence.  (Btw, I have been considering many of the claims made, and I believe that the assumptions, and solutions proposed are deeply flawed, merely moving problem from one place to another without eliminating it and without fixing the problem identified.  However, much as I would like, this is not the forum to present my analysis.)  Mulp 06:20, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  stuff 

message: I was intending to categorize this article, but can't figure out the appropriate category? Should it be USA government, Economics ??? Would be good if someone stamp some category down there. gathima 16:01, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  category 

message: There is NO Social Security Trust Fund. Any politician who says otherwise is lying. Gore actually had a good idea about that "lockbox." Username:BRivera
This article is Littered with politically motivated falsehood and disinformation. It is trying so hard not to upset right wing ideologues it is near useless. If wikipedia is going to became the home of semantic ideowarfare then wikipedia is going to become a useless rag.
By social security trust fund every american interested in the subject knows that in reality means debt owed to social security recipients for money borrowed from the system. That the last half of this article has become a disembling apologetic to ideologues hurts, not helps, its credibility. If an "explanation" of trustfund is needed it can be worded just as i did above.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.246.203.152 (talk) 23:46, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Trust Fund??? 

message: The real problem with the SS Trust Fund is not its existence but how it's invested. The special-issue Treasury Bonds in which the TF is now invested returned 5.5% in interest earnings to the TF in 2005. The Social Security Administration is essentially giving TF money to the Treasury to cover the National Debt. When the special-issue bonds expire, they are simply rolled over to a new issue. This is an irresponsible way of investing Trust Fund money. The SSA could get better rates of return on TF investment by buying municipal or corporate bonds. Moving TF investment into the private sector would provide stimulus for the national economy and make money available for growth. It would inject liquidity into the TF where none exists now. It would also remove any question as to the actual existence of the Trust Fund.
Sooner or later, the Federal Government must begin paying down the National Debt. The stability of the Dollar demands it. When SSA begins seeing a shortfall in FICA funding, it will have no recourse but to begin cashing its Treasury Bonds. It would much better to adopt a program of regular bond retirement than to wait for a day of reckoning. Virgil H. Soule (talk) 08:57, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The SSA is just a wing of the federal government. If the SSA invests in an external asset, then the rest of the government will have to cut spending or raise even more debt. The probability of slashing spending is up for debate, but if debt increases, then the federal government is essentially borrowing more debt so that one of its arms can invest in external investments. That's like you mortaging your house so you can buy investments. How much sense does that make? Novasource (talk) 03:40, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Trust Fund Investment 

message: :From an economic standpoint, the question of whether the trust fund is fact or fiction comes down to whether the trust fund contributes to national savings or not.   If $1 of Social Security taxes increases national savings by $1, the trust fund is real.  If $1 of Social Security taxes increases national savings by $0, the trust fund is not real.  A substantial body of economic research argues that the trust funds have led to only a small to modest increase in national savings and that the bulk of the trust fund has been spent.   Others suggest a more significant savings effect.  
:If the Social Security Trust Fund causes government spending to be higher and/or income tax rates to be lower, then the trust fund is not contributing to national savings.  No money is being saved.  On the other hand, if government spending and tax rates aren't affected by the existence of the trust fund, then the trust fund has contributed to national savings.  If trust fund increases national savings, then it really is a trust fund and has fulfilled its purpose.  This has been the subject of considerable controversy.
:An interesting comparison concerns the secondary market for third world debt, where traders have actually assigned dollar values (generally as a percentage of face value) to the obligations of certain third world governments.  According to some, the "value" of the Social Security trust funds hinges critically on the federal government's ability to pay back the money that it has borrowed from Social Security.  This would be true if the U.S. Social Security trust fund held debt of foreign countries, but as is, it is an incorrect and misleading comparison because the federal government is lending to itself.  If you write an I.O.U. to yourself and count this as an asset, this presents very different issues than if someone else writes you an I.O.U.
:The economic question is NOT whether the bonds represent legal obligations that will be fulfilled, the economic question is whether the U.S. bonds held by Social Security represent savings by allowing Social Security taxes collected in the past to reduce the need for taxes in the future.  Was $1 of taxes collected in 1980 saved so that it could be spent on a retiring baby boomer in 2020 (without tax increases)?   If the only way for the federal government to repay the bonds held by Social Security is by raising taxes in 2020, this suggests that the money collected in 1980 was spent on other government activities, not Social Security.  Those who believe the trust fund is real would say that tax increases would have been even higher without the trust fund.
:The following two scenarios help illustrate the concept.  Depending on which scenario is right, Social Security is either an accounting fiction or represents real economic savings.
:Scenario 1 (Trust Fund is an accounting fiction):
:*1980: $1 payroll tax collected in 1980
:*1980: $1 lent by Social Security to the federal government
:*1980: Federal government increases spending on government programs by $1
:*2020: Federal government raises taxes by $1 plus interest to repay the loan to Social Security
:*2020: $1 plus interest transferred from Federal Government to Social Security.
:Scenario 2 (Trust Fund represents real economic savings):
:*1980: $1 payroll tax collected in 1980
:*1980: $1 lent by Social Security to the federal government
:*1980: Federal government increases spending on government programs by $0
:*2020: Federal government raises taxes by $0 to repay the loan to Social Security.  Any tax increases that occur in 2020 would have happened anyway without Social Security.
:*2020: $1 plus interest transferred from Federal Government to Social Security.
:: Without citations, or any supporting economic theory (even references to relevent wikipedia content), the analogy of an "IOU to yourself" is ridiculous.  I'm going to delete again it since it's saved here for reintroduction after revisions. Lamfr (talk) 14:58, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  An Economic Perspective on the Structure of the Social Security Trust Fund 

message: This article is astounding. It's just repeats the official line and doesn't bother to present reality.
The only way the non-accounting fiction side works is if you pretend the SSA is not part of the federal government. Um, what?
The SSTF is an internal IOU. It is utterly meaningless in any sense other than internal accounting. I'm amazed Wikipedia editors cannot see this.
68.95.132.42 (talk) 02:43, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Per WP:NPOV, the point of view you espouse is fully presented in this article.  What's bugging you is that other views are also presented, and your personal opinion is not given the status of undisputed fact. JamesMLane t c 03:21, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Amazing bias 

message: The article states that "The trust fund contains the securities that will be redeemed to make benefit payments in the future when contributions derived from payroll taxes and self-employment contributions no longer are sufficient to fully fund then-current benefit payments."
I'm aware that various politicians have described the trust fund in these terms; however, if this description is accurate, there would no difficulty making Social Security payments in the event that Congress does not raise the debt ceiling before Aug. 2, 2011.
And yet, President Obama stated "I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't [raised the debt ceiling]. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it." http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20078789-503544.html
This fact demonstrates that the Social Security Trust Fund is, at best, nothing like what the Wikipedia article claims it to be.  Isn't it time that the article begins to reflect reality?  Wikipedia is not a place to sell pipe dreams. Novel compound (talk) 08:09, 20 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: If the United States defaulted on August 2, it s possible that regular bond holders wouldn't get paid as well.  The 2.6 trillion dollar Social Security "Trust Fund" is counted as part of the 14.3 trillion dollar debt limit that the government reached in July.  The national debt would only be 9 trillion dollars if you didn't include money owed to social security and other government agencies.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mattwdc (talk • contribs) 06:50, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

text: This article is just badly written and beyond help. Stick to the main Social Security (United States). WCCasey (talk) 21:53, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

text: The net effect of "redeeming" the special issue securities in this fund is that the taxpayer must pay again to replace what was already funded once with the Social Security payroll tax.  I was disappointed with the convoluted explanation that there is more than one way to make the fund whole, and also with the strange logic to determine whether or not it is a "real" trust fund.  The link to US Treasury Bonds article is out of place, because there are no US Treasury Bonds in this Trust Fund, are there?  173.247.29.132 (talk) 20:16, 22 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  False Claim in the Article 

message: It seems to be universally accepted that large debts to foreign lenders carry risks that debts to domestic lenders do not. The classic example is how the U.S. pressured the U.K. to cease hostilities during the Suez Crisis by threatening to sell some of its holdings of Sterling Bonds (see Suez_crisis#Financial_pressure). Presumably there are sources that discuss borrowing from the trust fund as safer than borrowing from, say, China. I hope that someone who knows this topic better than I do will draw upon them, and extend the article. ThomHImself (talk) 21:03, 11 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  No discussion of security 

message: I've been doing some research on the SSA as a part of larger work on Sovereign Wealth Funds.  It seems to me that there is no such this as the 'Social Security Trust Fund' in law.  There are two funds related to Federal Insurance Contributions Act for Social Security - the OASI (Old Age Surviors Insurance TF) and the DI (Disability Insurance).  There is no such fund as the "Social Security Trust Fund."  I grant that this usage is very common (in fact, SSA uses the phrase itself), however that doesn't change the fact that it is a kind of shorthand for the two funds, which are legally and financially separate.  My initial thought was to create a Disambig that pointed to new articles, one each for DI, OASI (and perhaps the two medicare trusts as well) (and blank the content from this article).  It occurred to me that first, there is not very much information available (to make an article) on either fund and that this might make it harder to find the information on the funds, however - so my second idea was to rewrite the article to make it much more clear that there is no such "Fund" as the "SSTF" - that there is a *political* concept of the SSTF and make the article about that, with a section on structure (basically rewrite the structure section and header of this article).  
Any thoughts on that?  My intention in all this is to clarify the position; right now the article seems like it's a discussion of the political concept of the SSTF - which is fine, but it doesn't really expose the *workings* of the thing very well.  Sahrin (talk) 17:41, 20 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that they seem a bit convoluted, but they seem to be that way in many sources, which even list the two under the same acronym, OASDI.  Also, if they are most commonly referred to under the same title 'Social Security Trust Fund', then we should also refer to is as such in the title, per WP:COMMONNAME.  It's not clear to me how exactly they differ in structure and function, but I don't know the topic particularly well, so do you think they are sufficiently different that they could/should have their own articles? AdventurousSquirrel (talk) 05:02, 1 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Renaming the Article 

message: It would be nice to list the size of the fund, and it would be great if there were a chart showing how the size has changed over time.96.238.40.229 (talk) 22:44, 5 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Size of the fund? 

message: My problem with this piece as it sits is not that it seems chatty or essayish... it's that it descends into macroeconomic jargon that even I, someone who pays some concentrated attention to the topic, can't quite follow without falling off.  Notably, in the Discussion section (which is somewhat essayish, but properly so IMHO), the phrase "real economic savings" is used multiple times, as the fulcrum of the argument, but with no real way to determine, either from context, or explicitly, whether what it means is "an increase in the amount of money in the American economy which is considered to be 'savings' rather than 'liquid assets/cash/checking' by whoever owns it", or whether it means "a reduction in the amount which is being spent by $UNNAMED_PARTY".  Since it seems important to know which, the entire section falls apart; this stuff probably needs to be unpacked one more layer by a competent economist who speaks English.--Baylink (talk) 22:07, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Noticebox/"real economic savings" 

message: I would suggest this article suffers from NPOV:undue weight do to the fact that it only mentions the 2011 report, and no reports prior or since.  The number of years out that the trust fund would be exhausted changes each year - because revenue and GDP growth predictions change each year - sometimes moving out a year or two, sometimes moving in a year or two.  It is true that we're no consuming the trust fund, which makes its end date less theoretical; but the end date has been about fifteen to twenty years in the future for the last two decades.  This article does not seem to have that perspective.  99.104.126.16 (talk) 21:35, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Undue weight of 2033 end date 

message: I removed a section that copies exactly material that claims to be copyrighted, see here.
https://books.google.com/books?id=os2XAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA80&lpg=PA80&dq=%22The+trust+fund+represents+a+legal+obligation+of+the+federal+government+to+program+beneficiaries.%22&source=bl&ots=hV3NRbOAA4&sig=OChKHXvQWOwsvY_2UQILbFQR7zQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAWoVChMI5ueL7OHpxgIVT0aICh201g86#v=onepage&q=%22The%20trust%20fund%20represents%20a%20legal%20obligation%20of%20the%20federal%20government%20to%20program%20beneficiaries.%22&f=false
68.111.139.195 (talk) 13:03, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for your vigilance. I believe the author of that book copied "his" text from our article. Wikipedia editor Farcaster added it on May 11, 2012, and the book was published on April 8, 2014. In at least one place, the author acknowledges copying verbatim from Wikipedia. I think we can safely assume the paragraphs you found were quoted from this article and not vice versa. If you still believe there is a problem, please follow the instructions at WP:Copyright problems. Thank you. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 17:22, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyright violation..