Some of our faithful readers challenged our claim in yesterday’s HOTLINE that Social Security and Medicare are going bankrupt. What about all the trillions of dollars stored in the “trust fund” they asked?

Such is the nature and effectiveness of the government propaganda campaign that many Americans believe everything is hunky dory – which is like a passenger on the Titanic saying the voyage is going well – so far.

Sorry. Things aren’t just fine. We dug a little deeper and got the numbers for how large the unfunded liabilities are in these programs as of the end of the fiscal year 2021. The chart below shows the financial calamity.

As for the “trust fund” supposedly filled with the surplus payroll tax revenues over the past two or three decades, again, sorry. Congress spent those payroll tax dollars on everything from Amtrak, to foreign aid, to the war in Iraq. There is no “trust fund.” That vault is empty.

Imagine for a moment that you were the CEO of a company and you snatched the money in the workers’ pension fund and spent it on other operations. You’d go to jail for running a Ponzi Scheme. That’s what Congress has been doing for fifty years, and it’s worse than anything Bernie Madoff ever did.