Mr. Sloan did a good job of explaining how the commission reports that there are no funds in the Social Security Trust Fund. This is something we've also heard from Paul O'Neill, the Secretary of the Treasury and a trustee of the Social Security Trust Fund. If you can't believe him, who can you believe?

Mr. Sloan explains it with a different twist. I can appreciate what anyone goes through trying to come up with an analogy or allegory to help explain what the government is doing. God knows, I wrestled with it a long time before finally coming up with the "kids piggy bank."

If you haven't heard that one, here it is. What the government is doing is a lot like robbing your kid's piggy bank, then putting a note inside. A note that tells your child that he or she must replace the money, with interest. Also saying that you can and will enforce it.

Allan Sloan, on the other hand, came up with the analogy of setting up a trust fund for yourself: "But instead of putting in $1 million of cash and stocks, you give the fund a $1 million I.O.U. from yourself." Then he goes on to say that this is exactly what the government has done when it took Social Security's surpluses. In 2016, when the government wants to draw on this fund it will have just as much trouble making that I.O.U. into real cash as you would yours.

It's a cute analogy. But, if you put up an I.O.U. from yourself, it's not really an I.O.U. it's a U.O.U. and that's what the government has truly left us. Having the power and ability to print more money, which would devalue existing currency, the government did the next sneakiest thing. They produced "special obligation" nonmarketable bonds and put those in the trust fund as U.O.U.s. These bonds are unique.

If and when the government must turn to its trust fund for cash—that's the day you will begin paying off these bogus promissory notes. In the current mantra, the government will either have to (1) raise income taxes, (2) borrow tons from the public by selling Treasury securities on the open market to investors or (3) cut expenses. Cutting expenses means reducing Social Security benefits, cutbacks in discretionary spending like education and defense, or a combination of both. Borrowing from investors just puts it on the credit card giving us more debt to pay off later, with interest.

No one but the American taxpayer pays off U.S. Treasury securities—marketable and nonmarketable alike. The government might like you to believe that "they" have never defaulted on Treasury securities, but the truth is that they use your money to pay them off. You pay everything, including the interest. It comes from your taxes. And isn't that where we started?

Towards the end, Mr. Sloan tries to get the government off the hook, to excuse them, to keep you from coming to the obvious conclusion that you gave them money and they gave you debt in return. He trys to avoid this as follows:

"And, by the way, the government hasn't 'stolen' Social Security money, as many people believe. The government has, indeed, borrowed the Social Security surplus.....It's replaced the money with I.O.U.s, and spent it. Had the trust fund bought anything other than Treasury securities, that money would have been saved. But it didn't. Not because anyone's a crook, but because that's how government trust funds put their surplus to work."

That's how government trust funds work? Put their surplus to work? For who? Imagine trustees in the private sector telling you something like that. Gee, if we had bought anything other than debt, that property would have been saved, might even have grown or improved.

How much further should we take this reasoning? If Bonnie and Clyde had left notes behind telling their banking victims to replace the money themselves, would they have been as innocent as newborns? Should muggers and burglars start handing out UOUs to their victims? Is this a defensible stance in court? Hey, I left him a UOU, what's he complaining about?

If you can call what the government does with surpluses "borrowing" you're a better man than me Charlie Brown.