The Medicare portion was never cut, but the social security portion was reduced mainly because the social security fund is still bringing in more money from tax receipts than it is paying out in benefits at this time, says Abdur Chowdhury, a professor at Marquette University and economic advisor to the Chicago Federal Reserve.
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Congress spent these surpluses, and the U.S. Treasury issued the Social Security Trust Fund special bonds, which can be redeemed whenever the Social Security system has a current account deficit.
Social Security payments are not entitlements: they are obligations to the people who paid the surpluses into the Social Security Trust Fund since 1983.
It will be in addition to the accumulation in the Social Security trust fund that would occur with no change in the current law.
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.
At its inception the Social Security Trust Fund and other trust funds were held Sacrosanct, i.e.
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Well, when we get back to fiscal responsibility, we'll start paying back the Social Security Trust Fund.
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That same amount will be credited to the Social Security Trust Fund, in the form of Treasury securities.
The Social Security trust fund bonds are explicitly backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.
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And besides, they insist, the Social Security Trust fund would be made whole through transfers from the general fund.
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The commission members who opposed privatisation wanted to underpin the solvency of the Social Security trust fund by raising contribution rates.
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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They also projected that the Social Security Trust Fund would be exhausted in 2032, 34 years from the time of the report.
Payroll taxes were raised and a surplus generated that is placed in the Social Security Trust Fund, which invests in Treasury bonds.
The Social Security trust fund, together with payroll taxes, is sufficient to cover program benefits for more than the next 20 years.
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Federal revenues and the Social Security trust fund are far too important to depend on the fuzzy distinction between employee and independent contractor.
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On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that the Social Security trust fund includes trillions in securities, representing past surpluses plus interest.
But what if funds borrowed to pay back the Social Security Trust Fund came at least in part from the Federal Reserve through Quantitative Easing?
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The public also prefers Clinton's overall approach to the budget negotiations and trusts Clinton more than the GOP to handle the Social Security trust fund responsibly.
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.
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 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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The Social Security trust fund will technically cover any shortfall for another 20 years or so, but then benefits would have to fall by about one-quarter to match outlays with revenues.
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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?
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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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.
Ostensibly privatized in the year 2000, NITC was bought by three Iranian pension funds: The State Retirement Fund (33%), the Social Security Organization (33%) and the Oil Employee Retirement and Saving Fund (34%).
Besides the main social-security fund, Argentina has an expensive mish-mash of health and welfare schemes, riddled with duplication and fraud.
The Social Security and pension fund annual increases based on the CPI made sense four decades ago when inflation was 12 percent and you could earn 12 percent in a plain vanilla bank certificate of deposit.
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