In 2005 Dems Blocked GOP Proposals to Fix Social Security… Today Social Security Is Officially In the Red

Posted by Jim Hoft on Sunday, October 30, 2011, 8:58 AM

In 2005 Congressional Democrats blocked Republican proposals to save Social Security.

Then they wildly cheered their own obstructionism during the State of the Union Address the following year.

Today Social Security is in the red.

(The Washington Post)


As Americans were focusing on Barack Obama’s record debt and unemployment the last two years, Social Security went cash negative this past year.

The Washington Post reported, via Free Republic:

Last year, as a debate over the runaway national debt gathered steam in Washington, Social Security passed a treacherous milestone. It went “cash negative.”

For most of its 75-year history, the program had paid its own way through a dedicated stream of payroll taxes, even generating huge surpluses for the past two decades. But in 2010, under the strain of a recession that caused tax revenue to plummet, the cost of benefits outstripped tax collections for the first time since the early 1980s.

Now, Social Security is sucking money out of the Treasury. This year, it will add a projected $46 billion to the nation’s budget problems, according to projections by system trustees. Replacing cash lost to a one-year payroll tax holiday will require an additional $105 billion. If the payroll tax break is expanded next year, as President Obama has proposed, Social Security will need an extra $267 billion to pay promised benefits.

But while talk about fixing the nation’s finances has grown more urgent, fixing Social Security has largely vanished from the conversation.

Lawmakers in both parties are ducking the issue, wary of agitating older voters and their advocates in Washington, who have long targeted politicians who try to tamper with federal retirement benefits.