Krauthammer and Newmark on Social Security
asking, as Betsy Newmark puts it,Just who is playing politics with Social Security?. Krauthammer points out (emphasis mine),

As I have been writing for years with stupefying redundancy — and obvious lack of success — this idea is a hoax. There is no trust fund. The past Social Security surpluses were spent the year they were created. The idea that in 2017, when the surpluses disappear, we will be able to go to a box in West Virginia to retrieve the money we need to make up the shortfall (between what Social Security takes in and what it pays out that year) is a deception. There is no money there. It will have to be borrowed or garnered from new taxes.

But things are worse than that. The fiscal problem starts to kick in not in 2017 but in 2009. The Social Security surplus, which Congress happily spends every year, peaks in 2008. Which means that starting in four years (and for every year thereafter) a budgetary squeeze begins, requiring new taxation or new borrowing.

If in 2010 tax revenue and spending remain exactly the same as in 2009, the Treasury will not end up with the same size deficit. It will end up with a larger deficit, because the amount of money it was receiving free and “borrowed” from the Social Security surplus will have shrunk.

That surplus shrinks from its peak in 2008 to zero in 2017 and goes negative after that. That is a very serious fiscal problem that starts not in 50 years, not even in 12 years, but in four.

That’s 2009, folks.

I go one step further, and say there’s no surplus. The way I see it, you don’t have a surplus any time you spend the money on other things, the way Congress has been doing.