Social Security Funding, as seen on Facebook:

[Jim Lane]

15. One core point of this message is simply false and we shouldn't be spreading it.

The quoted message states in part:

The Federal Government owes money to Social Security. That amount of money alone would fund SS for the next 60 years give or take.

Social Security is primarily a pay-as-you-go program. Current revenues (chiefly FICA taxes) are used to cover current expenses (chiefly payments to beneficiaries).

A pay-as-you-go program works fine if the basic demographics are fundamentally stable. Ours aren't stable, however, because of the baby boom (or, more precisely, the baby bust -- the decline in births that began in the early 1960s as the baby boom ended). Because this problem was foreseen, the boomers were taxed more than was necessary to maintain current payments, so that a trust fund could be built up to help cover their retirements.

The trust fund, however, serves only to make up the shortfall. Over the next 60 years, the principal source of each year's Social Security payments will continue to be that year's FICA tax revenues. The money in the trust fund alone would not fund Social Security for the next 60 years, but only for a few years (probably three or four but I haven't crunched the exact numbers).

This isn't a big deal because no one is talking about repealing the FICA tax while maintaining full Social Security benefits. Nevertheless, it doesn't help us to propagate misunderstandings about how the system works.