SS 💩

the site was working fine before you showed up

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 12, 2023

If you're watching the Sunday shows today here's a basic primary about how all the scare talk about "insolvency" is just bullshit. https://t.co/DfpBDnWCun via @TPM

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 12, 2023

It strikes me that there’s an analogy here. Musk sold himself as a “genius” (yeah, dem was de days), and when he said Twitter was broke and only he could fix it, we all figured “Sure, whatever.”

And now his absolute stupidity and claim Twitter was failing anyway has meant Twitter is probably irreparably damaged. Which, you know, it’s Twitter, we’ll survive if it dies. But ignorance is never a solution.

JMM’s argument (no paywall, feel free) is that Social Security will never be insolvent because the government will never go bankrupt. Again, and basically, we’ll never run government into the ground paying for the military, but we can’t afford what our citizens have paid for.

Never have figured out how that works.

But the same stupidity that broke Twitter will break Social Security if we let it. Because Elon Musk is about as bright as the clowns in the Congress in the GOP.

(Where does the insolvency idea even come from? Intentional (or just ignorant, which can never be discounted) misunderstanding:

A couple generations ago, Congress increased the tax to build up a surplus to pay for the benefits of the baby boom generation. That’s the “trust fund”. Social Security “lent” that extra money to the rest of the federal government, i.e., it purchased government bonds. Eventually that Trust Fund will run out of bonds to cash in. The current estimate is that that will happen in the mid-2030s. This is when Social Security supposedly become ‘insolvent”. 

But that’s a meaningless term. The federal government has to pay its promised benefits and if they can’t all be paid by out of payroll taxes the remainder can and will be paid out of general revenues.

 We don’t need to sunset Social Security to solve this problem, in other words.)