Despite the existence of the Social Security Trust Fund, surplus money isn't really set aside for pensions.
The commission members who opposed privatisation wanted to underpin the solvency of the Social Security trust fund by raising contribution rates.
Once George Bush came in and we went back to deficit spending, the last six and a half years what we've seen is a decrease in the life of the Social Security Trust Fund to 2041.
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Expenditures for social and cultural measures are also undertaken by enterprises and organizations, by the Fund for social security of population, trade unions etc.
The plan to invest some of the Social Security trust fund on Wall Street purports to address this: real assets would henceforth back the promise and, you might think, there is a double benefit because returns on Wall Street are higher than returns on the fund's existing portfolio of bonds.
On the current trajectory, the Social Security disability fund is projected to run out of money during Mr. Obama's second term.
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On June 19th it ordered all state-owned firms that had listed on the stockmarket since 2005 to transfer 10% of their shares to the National Social Security Fund to shore up its assets.
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What, then, you may ask, is the Social Security Trust Fund, the pool of money that people say will dry up and make it impossible for anyone to receive their Social Security payments?
The President's proposal would reduce the debt borrowed from the public, and deposit assets of an equal amount in the Social Security trust fund.
To make matters worse, a permanently temporary tax cut further damages the credibility of the Social Security system which the payroll levy is supposed to fund.
Last month the former director of a social-security fund in Gansu province was sentenced to death for embezzling 28m yuan over a decade.
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Quite simply, because the diversion of funds to individual accounts would reduce the money available to the Social Security trust fund.
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The 7.65% Solution has several other intriguing aspects, including the setting up of a genuine Social Security trust fund that could invest monies in corporate bonds.
As a result, the rate of payroll taxes for workers used to fund Social Security will increase from 4.2% (which was in place for the previous two tax years) to 6.2% as of January 1, 2013.
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The total current budget deficit in the last administration was at least a trillion dollars higher than reported because the maze of government accounting allows funds borrowed from government units, such as the Social Security Trust Fund, to be included with revenue.
That same amount will be credited to the Social Security Trust Fund, in the form of Treasury securities.
Funded by the 1.8% payroll tax and comprising nearly 18% of all social security spending, at current pace the trust fund may be exhausted by as early as 2015.
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Besides the main social-security fund, Argentina has an expensive mish-mash of health and welfare schemes, riddled with duplication and fraud.
Mr Clinton also added that the Social Security trust fund should be bolstered from general revenues by the amount of interest that this debt paydown had saved.
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But this is little consolation to the employers who must to pay their payroll taxes a second time, or to all of us who work our entire careers paying into the Social Security trust fund only to have it compromised by such schemes.
The Social Security trust fund bonds are explicitly backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.
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But Messrs Feldstein and Samwick also assume that the Social Security trust fund will be allowed to go into debt for about 20 of the next 75 years.
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They also projected that the Social Security Trust Fund would be exhausted in 2032, 34 years from the time of the report.
This would mean partially privatising Social Security, letting people set up individual retirement accounts and use part of their payroll taxes (which now fund Social Security) to invest in the stockmarket.
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Much of the world has used the opportunity provided by the 2003--05 flood of Greenspan dollars to increase the soundness of their monetary systems, create permanently lower tax rates and, for some, fund their social security systems.
More importantly, Social Security does not require a geometrically increasing number of young workers to fund the benefits it promises to retirees.
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Economic growth has resulted in high standards of living for many people since the government is able to fund social amenities as well as to provide social security services.
To the extent that lowering payroll taxes translates into a lowering of payment to Social Security, we ought to just fund it from other tax bases.
Number one is that the Social Security trust fund -- there wasn't a fence around it so people started borrowing out of it for other things.
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