If Your Parents Can’t Pay Their Bills, You May Have To

[Hatchling]

54. "today's seniors paid the Social Security and Medicare costs for their parents."

Not only thata but Boomers paid ahead for themselves as well, so as to not burden their children overly much.

The truth is, far from being greedy and robbing the next generation of workers, Boomers, for the first time in the history of the Social Security system, actually paid in advance into the Trust Fund in anticipation of the bigger drain on funds that would come when they all began to retire, at which point there’d be fewer younger workers paying into the system. Back in 1983, recognizing that the unprecedented wave of people born in the post World War II era would lead to a wave of retirees, Congress and the White House, under President Ronald Reagan, on the recommendation of a bi-partisan commission appointed by Reagan and headed by Alan Greenspan, later head of the Federal Reserve Bank, raised the FICA tax from 9.9% to 10.8%, and ultimately to 12.4%, paid half by employees and half by employers. This increase in funding built up a huge $2.4-trillion Trust Fund balance--one that was designed to be run down once the wave of Boomers began to retire (a point alarmist critics always fail to mention)...

http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/930

2) The Greenspan Commission recommended a major payroll tax hike to generate Social Security surpluses for the next 30 years, in order to build up a large reserve in the trust fund that could be drawn down during the years after Social Security began running deficits.

3) The 1983 Social Security amendments enacted hefty increases in the payroll tax in order to generate large future surpluses.

4) As soon as the first surpluses began to role in, in 1985, the money was put into the general revenue fund and spent on other government programs. None of the surplus was saved or invested in anything. The surplus Social Security revenue, that was paid by working Americans, was used to replace the lost revenue from Reagan’s big income tax cuts that went primarily to the

http://ampedstatus.org/how-your-social-security-money-was-stolen-where-did-the-2-5-trillion-surplus-go/