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Social security report: Business, and reaction, as usual

The executive director of the Christian Seniors Association warns that "big spender" members of Congress, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), and other special-interest groups are falsely indicating to Americans that the Annual Social Security and Medicare Trustees Report is an assurance of available funds. It's well known that the funds exist as IOUs and are raided for other expenditures, says James Lafferty.



An AARP press release calls the new 2041 date for exhaustion of Social Security funds "reassuring." But Lafferty says it reflects a continuation of the practice of "[pretending] there is a genuine trust fund from which Social Security checks are withdrawn."

"They were encouraged by that news," he notes, adding that "only someone who's getting major money from the federal government could be excited about the fact that the government is going to have to collect more taxes in order to pay for the money that it is taking from Social Security recipients."

According to Lafferty, the AARP got $53 million from the government for its various programs in 2006, and other congressional big spenders got their funds for pet programs -- which he says accounts for their favorable reaction to the Trustee's Report.

"Social Security recipients are the big losers in this whole game that's being played here right now," says the Christian Seniors spokesman. "There are a couple of members of Congress -- [people] like Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-California)... who are being honest and trying to hold the feet of the Congress to the fire. But everybody else is just pressing their foot on the gas and [saying] let's just keep spending."

Lafferty says the federal government has already borrowed more than $2 trillion from Social Security's old age and disability funds -- a debt that the 2007 Trustees' Report says may balloon to over $5 trillion by 2017. "[But] no one has any idea where the money will come from to pay back what has been borrowed ...," he notes.