"Before the horrors of Sept. 11, Democrats were denouncing President Bush for 'raiding' the Social Security Trust Fund and picking the 'lockbox.' A global recession is in the making, and Washington was debating something as meaningless and as silly as this.

Let's get some facts straight. Social Security taxes will exceed payments to beneficiaries by around $77 billion this year. Excess monies are turned over to the Treasury Department, and Social Security receives, in return, Uncle Sam's IOUs. Remember, the Social Security Trust Fund gets those IOUs regardless of what the government does with the money, whether the feds spend it, rebate it to taxpayers or use it to redeem U.S. government bonds held by the public. The money does not sit as cash in Social Security's coffers waiting to be paid out in the future.

The notion that these temporary Social Security surpluses can be used to reduce the national debt is a lot of smoke. Yes, a bondholder may get his money back, thereby cutting the publicly held portion of the national debt. But Uncle Sam still owes that IOU money to Social Security. The government's obligations haven't gone down one cent.

When those IOUs are due, Washington will get the money either from tax receipts or from borrowing. And this gets to the rub of the matter. A big, strong economy will make it relatively easy for Washington to redeem those IOUs; a weak one, just the opposite. That's a critical purpose of incentive-oriented tax cuts--the kind John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan successrully advocated, the kind that were dramatically watered down in this summer's tax cut. Such tax cuts enable the economy to grow. Both the Kennedy and Reagan reductions gave us muscular economic expansions.

The White House should firmly toss out all this jabber about lockboxes and trust funds and forcefully make the case for a vibrant economy's being the best guarantee for Social Security's future."

The man starts out with false figures, touches lightly on what he himself calls "the rub of the matter" (the IOUs that are really UOUs) fails to see the double taxation involved, and then acts as though it's alright to take it from the public if they are making enough money.

First of all, we all know that the "$77 billion" figure is closer to the interest that the Social Security Trust Fund will receive this fiscal year than it is to the surplus payroll taxes will generate for a supplemental retirement system that doesn't get any of that surplus money anyway. In fact, on August 14th, in a TUFF article titled "Be Advised" we covered the fact that as of July 31st the Social Security Trust Fund stood at $153 billion with $95.7 billion of that amount coming from payroll tax surplus, the rest from annual interest paid by simply handing the trust more bogus bonds. Now, wouldn't you think that a man owning a publication like Forbes, with all the attendant research staff that involves, would at least be able to get the numbers right? What sort of financial magazine is he running?

Then Mr. Forbes goes on to argue how tax cuts stimulate the economy and thereby produce more tax revenue for the government. Gee, what an insight. This overly simplistic fact is true, of course, but don't you find it just a little ironic that we just came out of the booming Nineties where "it's the economy, stupid" was the by-word for Clinton after he raised taxes?

"Incentive-oriented tax cuts?" Isn't that a good one? More nonsense from a man who can't find any other justification for returning overcharges, for not continuing to take your money when it isn't needed. Here, we'll give you back some of your money on the condition that you buy back some of the debt we took out in your name.

In these times, we need honesty instead of move drivel from nit-wits.