If You Are A Baby Boomer - the real reason YOU SHOULD BE FURIOUS over CPI cuts:

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144. Social Security may not be responsible for the debt

but it is rapidly becoming a part of it. When the Great Recession started a few years ago, the amount of FICA taxes paid in finally dropped below the amount that was paid out under Social Security benefit programs. That has continued for the last few years, and with the baby boomers starting to hit the system a couple of years ago (the leading edge, born in 1946 turned 65 in 2011), we'll see a nearly twenty year wave of continued boomers all looking for their checks. I don't see FICA being greater than benefits again for a long, long time.

Finally, the Federal Government managed to pay some interest payments to the Trust Fund, but until we run budget surpluses, those interest payments are partly financed by borrowing. And the interest rates our government pays today are nothing compared to what has been paid historically. Financing the interest for the Trust Fund, and redeeming securities out of it is going to take either budget surpluses, further borrowing, or inflating the currency. There's simply no other ways.

The ugly truth is that Congress kept financing spending out of those FICA surpluses, and with them being gone, the jig is up. Now is the time when entitlement spending is going to dwarf everything else in the budget, yes, even military spending. I, too wish we did not get involved in ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I'm perfectly fine with hunting down AQ with drones.

We're at the end of the game. I know 2-3 trillion dollars sounds like a lot of money to you, but when you consider the tens of millions of retirees we're going to have, all getting many thousands of dollars per year in Social Security checks, that doesn't look like too much money. The size of that generation is nearly 80 million people, doing the math shows that's only $32,500 per person. Since life expectancy at 65 is about twenty years, that works out to only $1,625 a year for those folks. Do you see the problem?