[watersb]

> have an obligation to invest their excess ... in federal securities.

The Social Security surplus is pretty much required to purchase US bonds and other guaranteed Federal securities.

But saying that "contributes to the Federal debt" is like saying your 401k contributes to corporate debt.

I am still not convinced that Social Security causes Federal debt the way that a trillion-dollar military budget does.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I don't understand why this is being discussed rationally. The motivation to remove social security isn't economic or rational, it's political and psychological.

A small group of people considers itself superior to the rest of the population. As a group it is convinced it deserves every break, benefit, privilege, and handout, while the second group is only worthy of intrusive oversight, abuse, exploitation, and punishment.

This isn't hyperbole. This is the political belief system that drives the rhetoric about the government spending and debt.

The proof is simple - government debt always increases when the first group is in power.

Always.

This wouldn't happen if it was really about the deficit.

[const_cast]

> The motivation to remove social security isn't economic or rational, it's political and psychological.

Yes this is it and this is all it ever was. The second the pen was put to paper and SS was made law it has been under attack. People have been proclaiming it'll go insolvent any day now for almost a century.

It's an ideological attack and we shouldn't even humor these people. The idea of essentially retirement insurance feels unfair to a ton of people and that's that.

[jack_h]

The Social Security surplus is used to fund general government operations and the Social Security Administration gets an IOU (Treasury security) in return. So it's still money the government didn't have before that it uses to fund its operations that it borrowed from a different self-funded program that had an excess, and it still needs to pay it back with interest. Usually the Treasury doesn't have enough tax dollars to pay it back, so they auction more bonds to the public and it gets added to the public debt at that point. However, if effective tax rates go up or spending is cut elsewhere then it can pay it back without adding to publicly held debt.

So you're right that it's not the same as publicly held debt. Rather intragovernmental debt is deferring the decision of how to pay for some governmental services to a later time, although usually it becomes publicly held debt. One way or another, the tax payer is on the hook for this spending which is part of the gross national debt, just like they're on the hook for publicly held debt.