Social Security Trust Fund Tops $2.6 Trillion
i
8 Votes
Well folks, it’s that time of year again.
I decided to take a look at the newer 2011 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) for the Social Security Trust Funds – which is actually named:
“THE 2011 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE
FEDERAL OLD-AGE AND SURVIVORS INSURANCE
AND FEDERAL DISABILITY INSURANCE TRUST FUNDS”
You may download this CAFR here:
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/2011/
Yes… for those of you who don’t know, the Social Security program has a massive investment trust fund that hoards your hard earned money into it every single year, and uses that money to invest in such things as war and occupation of other countries, junk bonds and federal securities – including mortgage-backed securities – and of course national and international banks and investments.
Remember, the main function of government’s taxation program is not to support government operations, but rather to increase the fund balances of governmental funds in order to create and support a massive investment based pool, which is then used for all of the non-taxpayer legal criminal activities that government participates in – what it deems as “non-governmental operations” using what it likes to consider “non-taxpayer money” derived from these investments and their returns. You see, your corporate government figures that any gains it is able to collect from investing your taxpayer money is there’s to keep and play around with at its leisure.
Of course, the Federal government continues to tell the people of America that the Social Security system is in financial ruin, and will be broke by the time many of us come-a-collectin’ in just a couple of decades. They tell us that the evil baby-boomers will strip Social Security bare, and drain the entire program into oblivion.
But I’m here to tell you that this just isn’t true. In fact, it is one of the biggest fallacies ever perpetrated upon the American public. It is a lie hidden in plain sight, just as most government programs and funds have turned out to be.
And so, according to the 2011 CAFR for the Board of Trustees of the Social Security System, the Social Security Trust Funds have a combined total of…
$2.6 trillion dollars.
W-W-What? You heard that right, my friends. Spelled out with all of those pesky zeros in place, that looks like this…
Total assets, December 31, 2010
$2,608,950,000,000
If that were to be displayed in 1 dollar bills, it would be a pile of green notes that, when stacked on top of each other, would reach all the way to the moon… and back!!!
For those of you who didn’t see the ending of “The Great Pension Fund Hoax”, we discovered that the Social Security trust funds had over $2.5 trillion dollars in the 2009 CAFR. In 2006, that figure was $1.8 trillion. That was an investment return of about $700 billion dollars in just 5 short years.
See the full film here, or skip ahead to the last half hour to see this information:
Now, as is usually the case, the government omits this knowledge from its public disclosure of the Social insurance system by simply omitting the pertinent investment portfolio and interest gains from the taxpayer budget report that is spirited out to the public. And it does not mention the word CAFR in any session of government or in any public forum. You will not hear about this report on the nightly news. In short, by hiding this information from taxpayer disclosure, the government is lying by omission. And this sort of malfeasance is taking place in every facet of local, county, state, and federal government.
Now, let’s take a look at what Timothy Geithner and the other Trustees of the Social Security Trust Funds have to say to the public about the state of these funds…
Status of the Social Security and Medicare Programs
A SUMMARY OF THE 2011 ANNUAL REPORTS
Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A MESSAGE TO THE PUBLIC:
Each year the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust
funds report on the current and projected financial status of the
two programs. This message summarizes our 2011 Annual Reports.
Social Security
Social Security expenditures exceeded the program’s non-interest
income in 2010 for the first time since 1983. The $49 billion
deficit last year (excluding interest income) and $46
billion projected deficit in 2011 are in large part due to the
weakened economy and to downward income adjustments that
correct for excess payroll tax revenue credited to the trust funds
in earlier years. This deficit is expected to shrink to about $20
billion for years 2012-2014 as the economy strengthens.
After 2014, cash deficits are expected to grow rapidly as the
number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially
faster rate than the number of covered workers. Through 2022,
the annual cash deficits will be made up by redeeming trust fund
assets from the General Fund of the Treasury. Because these
redemptions will be less than interest earnings, trust fund
balances will continue to grow. After 2022, trust fund assets will
be redeemed in amounts that exceed interest earnings until trust
fund reserves are exhausted in 2036, one year earlier than was
projected last year. Thereafter, tax income would be sufficient to
pay only about three-quarters of scheduled benefits through 2085.
Source: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TRSUM/index.html
Well now, wait a darn minute here! Didn’t the CAFR just state that the Social Security system had a $90 billion dollar increase in capital gains? How then can this budget report state with a straight face that the fund suffered a $46 billion dollar loss?
Ah… this is government’s creative accounting.
But let’s go one step further.
Back to the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, where it shows on page 36:
Actuarial Estimates
Table IV.A1. – Operations of the OASI Trust Fund, Calendar Years 2006-2020
1) Best case scenario – The fund will increase to
$4.054 trillion dollars by 2020, which equals an investment gain of about $1.4 trillion dollars in just 8 years.
2) Intermediate scenario – The Fund will increase to
$3.671 trillion dollars by 2020, which equals an investment gain of about $1 trillion dollars in just 8 years.
3) Worse case scenario – The fund will increase to
$3.278 trillion dollars by 2020, which equals an investment gain of about $600 billion dollars in just 8 years.
So here the Board of Trustees is telling us in the CAFR (audit) of these funds that they will no doubt increase by at least many hundreds of billions of dollars, while at the same time publicly announcing that the Social Security system is showing a current and a future projected deficit of $46 billion dollars for 2011 fiscal year.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the perfect embodiment of how your many governments, be it local, state, or federal, are literally fooling you by the simple act of omission of the pertinent information held within the government audit (the CAFR report) and spoon-feeding the American public a heaping dose of fear-based half-truths sprinkled with a splash of treason, and finished off with a good laugh all the way to the banks (which government owns as majority stock holder of those banks).
And we the people keep feeding the monkeys instead of starving them!
Oh, I’m sorry…
Did I interrupt re-runs of “Dancing With The Stars”?
.
–Clint Richardson (realitybloger.wordpress.com)
–Friday, January 27th, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
34 Facts about Debt
34 Shocking Facts About U.S. Debt That Should Set America On Fire With Anger
We have all been lied to. For decades, the leaders of both major political parties have promised us that they can fix our current system and that they can get our national debt under control. As the 2012 election approaches, they are making all kinds of wild promises once again. Well you know what? It is all a giant sham. The United States has gotten into so much debt that there will be no coming back from this. The current system is irretrievably broken. 30 years ago the U.S. debt was a horrific crisis that was completely and totally out of control. If we would have dealt with it back then maybe we could have done something about it. But now it is 15 times larger, and we are adding more than a trillion dollars to the debt every single year. The facts that you are about to read below should set America on fire with anger. Please share them with as many people as you can. What we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is absolutely nightmarish. Words like "abuse", "financial rape", "theft" and "crime" do not even begin to describe what we are doing to future generations. We were the wealthiest nation on earth, but it wasn't good enough just to squander all of our own money. We had to squander the money of our children and our grandchildren as well. America has been so selfish and so self-centered that it is hard to argue that we don't deserve what is about to happen to this country. We have stolen the future of America, and yet we strut around as if we are the smartest generation that ever walked the face of the earth.
All of this prosperity that we see all around us is just an illusion. It is a false prosperity that has been purchased by the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world.
Did you know that if you added up all forms of debt in the United States and divided it up equally that every single family in the country would owe more than $683,000?
We are a nation that is absolutely addicted to debt, and the U.S. debt crisis threatens to destroy everything that our forefathers built.
Yes, everything may seem fine for the moment, but what do you think would happen if the federal government suddenly adopted a balanced budget?
1.3 trillion dollars a year would be sucked right out of the economy and we would be looking at an "economic readjustment" that would be mind blowing.
Enjoy this false prosperity while you can, because it is not going to last.
Debt is a very cruel master, and our day of reckoning is almost here.
The following are 34 shocking facts about U.S. debt that should set America on fire with anger....
#1 During fiscal year 2011, the U.S. government spent 3.7 trillion dollars but it only brought in 2.4 trillion dollars.
#2 When Ronald Reagan took office, the U.S. national debt was less than 1 trillion dollars. Today, the U.S. national debt is over 15.2 trillion dollars.
#3 During 2011, U.S. debt surpassed 100 percent of GDP for the first time ever.
#4 According to Wikipedia, the monetary base "consists of coins, paper money (both as bank vault cash and as currency circulating in the public), and commercial banks' reserves with the central bank." Currently the U.S. monetary base is sitting somewhere around 2.7 trillion dollars. So if you went out and gathered all of that money up it would only make a small dent in our national debt. But afterwards there would be no currency for anyone to use.
#5 The U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt during fiscal 2011.
#6 The U.S. government has total assets of 2.7 trillion dollars and has total liabilities of 17.5 trillion dollars. The liabilities do not even count 4.7 trillion dollars of intragovernmental debt that is currently outstanding.
#7 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.
#8 It is being projected that the U.S. national debt will surpass 23 trillion dollars in 2015.
#9 According to the GAO, the U.S. government is facing 34 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities for social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare. These are obligations that we have already committed ourselves to but that we do not have any money for.
#10 Others estimate that the unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government now total over 117 trillion dollars.
#11 According to the GAO, the ratio of debt held by the public to GDP is projected to reach 287 percent of GDP by 2086.
#12 Others are much less optimistic. A recently revised IMF policy paper entitled “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” projects that U.S. government debt will rise to about 400 percent of GDP by the year 2050.
#13 The United States government is responsible for more than a third of all the government debt in the entire world.
#14 If you divide up the national debt equally among all U.S. taxpayers, each taxpayer would owe approximately $134,685.
#15 Mandatory federal spending surpassed total federal revenue for the first time ever in fiscal 2011. That was not supposed to happen until 50 years from now.
#16 Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. GDP grew by only 4.26%, but the U.S. national debt soared by 61% during that same time period.
#17 During Barack Obama's first two years in office, the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt than the first 100 U.S. Congresses combined.
#18 When you add up all spending by the federal government, state governments and local governments, it comes to 46.6% of GDP.
#19 Our nation is more addicted to government checks than ever before. In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income. Today, government transfer payments account for 18.4% of all income.
#20 U.S. households are now actually receiving more money directly from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes.
#21 A staggering 48.5% of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits. Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.
#22 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.
#23 In 1950, each retiree's Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 U.S. workers. According to new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are now only 1.75 full-time private sector workers for each person that is receiving Social Security benefits in the United States.
#24 The U.S. government now says that the Medicare trust fund will run out five years faster than they were projecting just last year.
#25 Right now, spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percent of GDP. Back in 2001, it accounted for just 18 percent.
#26 If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 trillion to $5 trillion each and every year.
#27 If you were alive when Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now. But this year alone the U.S. government is going to add more than a trillion dollars to the national debt.
#28 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.
#29 A trillion $10 bills, if they were taped end to end, would wrap around the globe more than 380 times. That amount of money would still not be enough to pay off the U.S. national debt.
#30 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 470,000 years to pay off the national debt.
#31 If Bill Gates gave every penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.
#32 According to Professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, the U.S. is facing a "fiscal gap" of over 200 trillion dollars in the future. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article that he did for CNN....
The government's total indebtedness -- its fiscal gap -- now stands at $211 trillion, by my arithmetic. The fiscal gap is the difference, measured in present value, between all projected future spending obligations -- including our huge defense expenditures and massive entitlement programs, as well as making interest and principal payments on the official debt -- and all projected future taxes.
#33 If you add up all forms of debt in the United States (government, business and consumer), it comes to more than 56 trillion dollars. That is more than $683,000 per family. Unfortunately, the average amount of savings per family in the U.S. is only about $4,735.
#34 The U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913.
But do our leaders care about statistics such as these?
No.
In fact, Barack Obama says that we need to raise the debt limit by another 1.2 trillion dollars.
The absurdity of raising the debt limit when we are already in so much debt is beautifully illustrated by the video posted below....
I just thought that video was so well done.
The "huge cuts" that Congress has agreed to are absolutely meaningless when compared to how rapidly our debt is exploding.
Calling those cuts "pocket change" would be an insult to pocket change.
But it is not just U.S. debt that is the problem. The European debt crisis threatens to completely unravel in 2012 and Japan actually has the highest debt to GDP ratio in the entire industrialized world.
In 2012, a total of 7,600,000,000,000 dollars of debt must be rolled over by the G-7 nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China.
That doesn't even count new borrowing. That number just represents old debts that are coming due that must be refinanced.
Anyone out there that insists that this debt bubble can be fixed under our current system is lying.
A massive amount of financial pain is coming.
It is time for Americans to wake up from their television-induced comas.
It is time for Americans to get very angry.
Your future has been destroyed and the future of your children and grandchildren has been destroyed.
You better take action while you still can.
We have all been lied to. For decades, the leaders of both major political parties have promised us that they can fix our current system and that they can get our national debt under control. As the 2012 election approaches, they are making all kinds of wild promises once again. Well you know what? It is all a giant sham. The United States has gotten into so much debt that there will be no coming back from this. The current system is irretrievably broken. 30 years ago the U.S. debt was a horrific crisis that was completely and totally out of control. If we would have dealt with it back then maybe we could have done something about it. But now it is 15 times larger, and we are adding more than a trillion dollars to the debt every single year. The facts that you are about to read below should set America on fire with anger. Please share them with as many people as you can. What we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is absolutely nightmarish. Words like "abuse", "financial rape", "theft" and "crime" do not even begin to describe what we are doing to future generations. We were the wealthiest nation on earth, but it wasn't good enough just to squander all of our own money. We had to squander the money of our children and our grandchildren as well. America has been so selfish and so self-centered that it is hard to argue that we don't deserve what is about to happen to this country. We have stolen the future of America, and yet we strut around as if we are the smartest generation that ever walked the face of the earth.
All of this prosperity that we see all around us is just an illusion. It is a false prosperity that has been purchased by the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world.
Did you know that if you added up all forms of debt in the United States and divided it up equally that every single family in the country would owe more than $683,000?
We are a nation that is absolutely addicted to debt, and the U.S. debt crisis threatens to destroy everything that our forefathers built.
Yes, everything may seem fine for the moment, but what do you think would happen if the federal government suddenly adopted a balanced budget?
1.3 trillion dollars a year would be sucked right out of the economy and we would be looking at an "economic readjustment" that would be mind blowing.
Enjoy this false prosperity while you can, because it is not going to last.
Debt is a very cruel master, and our day of reckoning is almost here.
The following are 34 shocking facts about U.S. debt that should set America on fire with anger....
#1 During fiscal year 2011, the U.S. government spent 3.7 trillion dollars but it only brought in 2.4 trillion dollars.
#2 When Ronald Reagan took office, the U.S. national debt was less than 1 trillion dollars. Today, the U.S. national debt is over 15.2 trillion dollars.
#3 During 2011, U.S. debt surpassed 100 percent of GDP for the first time ever.
#4 According to Wikipedia, the monetary base "consists of coins, paper money (both as bank vault cash and as currency circulating in the public), and commercial banks' reserves with the central bank." Currently the U.S. monetary base is sitting somewhere around 2.7 trillion dollars. So if you went out and gathered all of that money up it would only make a small dent in our national debt. But afterwards there would be no currency for anyone to use.
#5 The U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt during fiscal 2011.
#6 The U.S. government has total assets of 2.7 trillion dollars and has total liabilities of 17.5 trillion dollars. The liabilities do not even count 4.7 trillion dollars of intragovernmental debt that is currently outstanding.
#7 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.
#8 It is being projected that the U.S. national debt will surpass 23 trillion dollars in 2015.
#9 According to the GAO, the U.S. government is facing 34 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities for social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare. These are obligations that we have already committed ourselves to but that we do not have any money for.
#10 Others estimate that the unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government now total over 117 trillion dollars.
#11 According to the GAO, the ratio of debt held by the public to GDP is projected to reach 287 percent of GDP by 2086.
#12 Others are much less optimistic. A recently revised IMF policy paper entitled “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” projects that U.S. government debt will rise to about 400 percent of GDP by the year 2050.
#13 The United States government is responsible for more than a third of all the government debt in the entire world.
#14 If you divide up the national debt equally among all U.S. taxpayers, each taxpayer would owe approximately $134,685.
#15 Mandatory federal spending surpassed total federal revenue for the first time ever in fiscal 2011. That was not supposed to happen until 50 years from now.
#16 Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. GDP grew by only 4.26%, but the U.S. national debt soared by 61% during that same time period.
#17 During Barack Obama's first two years in office, the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt than the first 100 U.S. Congresses combined.
#18 When you add up all spending by the federal government, state governments and local governments, it comes to 46.6% of GDP.
#19 Our nation is more addicted to government checks than ever before. In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income. Today, government transfer payments account for 18.4% of all income.
#20 U.S. households are now actually receiving more money directly from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes.
#21 A staggering 48.5% of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits. Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.
#22 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.
#23 In 1950, each retiree's Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 U.S. workers. According to new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are now only 1.75 full-time private sector workers for each person that is receiving Social Security benefits in the United States.
#24 The U.S. government now says that the Medicare trust fund will run out five years faster than they were projecting just last year.
#25 Right now, spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percent of GDP. Back in 2001, it accounted for just 18 percent.
#26 If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 trillion to $5 trillion each and every year.
#27 If you were alive when Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now. But this year alone the U.S. government is going to add more than a trillion dollars to the national debt.
#28 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.
#29 A trillion $10 bills, if they were taped end to end, would wrap around the globe more than 380 times. That amount of money would still not be enough to pay off the U.S. national debt.
#30 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 470,000 years to pay off the national debt.
#31 If Bill Gates gave every penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.
#32 According to Professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, the U.S. is facing a "fiscal gap" of over 200 trillion dollars in the future. The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article that he did for CNN....
The government's total indebtedness -- its fiscal gap -- now stands at $211 trillion, by my arithmetic. The fiscal gap is the difference, measured in present value, between all projected future spending obligations -- including our huge defense expenditures and massive entitlement programs, as well as making interest and principal payments on the official debt -- and all projected future taxes.
#33 If you add up all forms of debt in the United States (government, business and consumer), it comes to more than 56 trillion dollars. That is more than $683,000 per family. Unfortunately, the average amount of savings per family in the U.S. is only about $4,735.
#34 The U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913.
But do our leaders care about statistics such as these?
No.
In fact, Barack Obama says that we need to raise the debt limit by another 1.2 trillion dollars.
The absurdity of raising the debt limit when we are already in so much debt is beautifully illustrated by the video posted below....
I just thought that video was so well done.
The "huge cuts" that Congress has agreed to are absolutely meaningless when compared to how rapidly our debt is exploding.
Calling those cuts "pocket change" would be an insult to pocket change.
But it is not just U.S. debt that is the problem. The European debt crisis threatens to completely unravel in 2012 and Japan actually has the highest debt to GDP ratio in the entire industrialized world.
In 2012, a total of 7,600,000,000,000 dollars of debt must be rolled over by the G-7 nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China.
That doesn't even count new borrowing. That number just represents old debts that are coming due that must be refinanced.
Anyone out there that insists that this debt bubble can be fixed under our current system is lying.
A massive amount of financial pain is coming.
It is time for Americans to wake up from their television-induced comas.
It is time for Americans to get very angry.
Your future has been destroyed and the future of your children and grandchildren has been destroyed.
You better take action while you still can.
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