Fmr. Bush’s Social Security Admin COO James B. Lockhart III visited PDR to discuss the state of many of our social programs, specifically Social Security. His book's America: Under Water & Sinking.
This kind of obsolete thinking really bugs me. Social Security, unlike most corporations, has always had enough funds to meet its obligations, even though it doesn't have access to things like bank loans that corporations freely make use of to get them through lean quarters. The entire SS funding issue could be permanently solved quite easily, by simply printing the money to cover any looming shortfalls, either by congress authorizing the fed to do it or by "minting the coin." This would NOT be inflationary because we wouldn't be increasing the money people have to spend. Retirees would simply keep getting what they're already getting. The second-best solution is to simply cover any shortfall out of the general fund like we do with virtually everything else, which would mean more debt, but in an MMT world that shouldn't be a huge issue. The last thing we need is some old-school thinker like this guy trying to fix things with austerity. We've seen how that works.
This kind of obsolete thinking really bugs me. Social Security, unlike most corporations, has always had enough funds to meet its obligations, even though it doesn't have access to things like bank loans that corporations freely make use of to get them through lean quarters. The entire SS funding issue could be permanently solved quite easily, by simply printing the money to cover any looming shortfalls, either by congress authorizing the fed to do it or by "minting the coin." This would NOT be inflationary because we wouldn't be increasing the money people have to spend. Retirees would simply keep getting what they're already getting. The second-best solution is to simply cover any shortfall out of the general fund like we do with virtually everything else, which would mean more debt, but in an MMT world that shouldn't be a huge issue. The last thing we need is some old-school thinker like this guy trying to fix things with austerity. We've seen how that works.
You nailed it! Economist Stephanie Kelton and Richard Wolff would agree.