The Social Security Acounting Trick

One of the positive by-products of the debt negotiations is the fact that more and more people are learning that the Social Security Trust Fund is an accounting fiction.

Sometimes it takes a crisis for the truth to come out.  Bernie Madoff would still be scamming his clients if the market had not tanked and enough people wanted their money back.  The public would still think that there is a real Social Security trust fund with real assets in it until Obama threatened that Social Security checks may not go out unless the government could borrow more money.

Mark Steyn: 

That monthly Social Security check? Fuhgeddabouddit. “I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven’t resolved this issue,” declared the president. “Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.”

But hang on. I thought the Social Security checks came out of the famous “Social Security trust fund,” whose “trustees” assure us there’s currently $2.6 trillion in there. Which should be enough for the August 3rd check run, shouldn’t it? Golly, to listen to the president, you’d almost get the impression that, by the time you saw the padlock off the old Social Security lockbox, there’s nothing in there but a yellowing IOU and a couple of moths. Indeed, to listen to Obama, one might easily conclude that the whole rotten, stinking edifice of federal government is an accounting trick. And that can’t possibly be so, can it?

I'm curious why we on the Right, including those in elected office are not making a bigger deal about this.