Dear editor:
In today's (June 11) letters, Judith Zitko, a local liberal, gave her version of the "real" story about SS. She erroneously claims the Social Security Trust Fund has a large and growing surplus. Not exactly. The truth is, while it does contain U.S. treasuries, it doesn't have any actual cash in it. The treasuries are nothing more than "IOUs" from Uncle Sam.
You see, when the government receives funds from the FICA tax, that money goes into the general revenue fund in exchange for treasuries that go into the SS Trust Fund; you can thank LBJ, a Democrat, for starting that. In other words, the government is borrowing against the fund to pay SS benefits; the money actually comes from the general revenue fund or they have to borrow it from other sources.
To prove this, one only has to remember what President Obama said back in 2011 when answering a question about whether he could guarantee that Social Security checks would go out the day after the government was supposed to reach its debt limit: "I cannot guarantee that those checks (he included veterans and the disabled, in addition to Social Security) go out if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it." Now if there was actual cash in the SS Trust Fund, this should not have been a problem. Another issue now is that the government is paying out more benefits than we are taking in from revenues.
Ms. Zitko is right in one regard, changes do need to be made somewhere to ensure the long-term survival of SS. BTW, while I believe you will always get more truth than fiction from Fox News vs. other networks, I encourage everybody to do their own research, as well.
Mike Williams
Hot Springs Village
Editorial on 06/12/2018