If anyone still has faith in the Wall Street Journal after reading this, then they are in need of a great deal of help.

With the primaries coming up, presidential candidates are scrambling for issues to add to their bag of promises. Since “saving” Social Security has usually been a viable subject, many are bringing it up again. Here’s what the Wall Street Journal had to say on the subject in an article coauthored by Michael M. Phillips and John D. McKinnon published February 1, 2008:

“Mr. Bush failed to work out a deal with Congress to tackle the spiraling costs of government health and retirement programs…As a result, the ambitions of Mr. Bush’s successor to cut taxes, institute universal health care or aid troubled homeowners might have to give way to the reality of soaring costs for Social Security, the Medicare program for the elderly and the Medicaid program for the poor.”

What a crock. Social Security supports itself with revenue from Payroll Taxes. What’s more, Social Security produces an annual surplus that the government steals and spends elsewhere, what would be labeled a capital crime were it committed in the private sector. Last Year, fiscal 2007, that surplus was $82.4 billion.  

What’s more, the accumulated surpluses amount to the mind boggling figure of $2.2 trillion as of the end of the last calendar year.

All of this is faithfully reported in the U.S. Treasury’s Monthly Statement, table 8, and third from the last page. Follow these reports and it will be difficult to believe that Social Security needs to be “fixed” or requires “saving.” The only thing Social Security needs is to force the government to keep its grubby hands off surpluses and allow the Social Security Administration to do what’s right with the people’s money.

The government has another lie when they say that they “invested” the surplus in Treasury Bonds. If they had, the money still would have fallen into their greedy hands.

Another interpretation is that they took the money then issued bonds to the Social Security trust fund in exactly the same amount. Take your pick.

Some people, including President Bush, call these bonds useless. And they are as far as it concerns you and me. But they are very real in the sense that they are demands on the Treasury that the Social Security Administration can cash-in at any time, just as the Federal Employees Retirement Insurance trust or the Federal Employees Life and Health Insurance trust do every month.

The latter never has any income, none, zero, zip, nada, squat, but its total balance somehow increases every month. When I asked the federal employees in charge of posting this trust, the only answer I got was that it’s “a floating trust.”

Last but not least, the spinmeisters tell us that Social Security is going bust because of the “baby boomers” due to start retiring this year. That the system can’t possibly survive beyond 2141 or thereabouts.

Let’s take a look at what happens when annual interest is added to the chart each year based on the previous year’s closing balance:

The total trust is the combination of these two amounts just as the national debt is the combination of Debt Held by the Public (investor debt) and Intragovernmental Holdings (the scam). Notice that the interest amount is on a constant increase and will never go down. It will soon be enough to subsidize the entire Social System system.

The Wall Street Journal wants us to believe that the nation’s debt is only “$5 trillion.” The other $4 trillion doesn’t count, probably under the excuse that the Intragovernmental Holdings part is simply money that we owe ourselves and needn’t pay back. We just love being charged twice for the same thing, plus interest.