Standard Mischief

I’m going to take a page from the “Sinister Side of Life” and name tgirsch by name, but not link to him in my blog. Below was a comment I left over there, but the comment appears to not have been accepted. I don’t think anything sinister happened, it’s just that two prior comments were accepted a short time before, and I had javascript turned off.

I will link to the guy that helped me figure out why we issue a special IOU T-bills into the two Social Security “trust funds”, instead of having them just buy negotiable instruments from the marketplace. That person is Karl Denninger

Dan M. says: …I especially like how SM is repeatedly claiming that the lines on that graph are going up as they go down…

It’s actually pretty simple, the line went down, except…

You can’t spend the Social Security surplus to pay down the debt and at the same time claim we didn’t spend the surplus, we saved it in those special, Social Security only IOU-not-negotiable-T-bills. Subtract the surplus unfairly applied, and you’ll find the lines did not go down. Mind you, it wasn’t just Clinton that pulled this accounting scam. Every modern administration has used the same trick.

Also, due to the internet bubble-boom years, (remember pets.com and a million clones burning through their IPO cash and then sinking like a rock?) the Social Security surplus was significantly larger. Clinton can take credit for this though, because Al Gore invented the internet.

It’s still somewhat of a pastebin rather than a post, but I hope you can figure it out.