Mr. Kimball: The “surplus myth” argument is incorrect. If receipts exceed outlays, you have a surplus. The federal government had a surplus in every one of the four years 1998-2001. It’s as simple as that. The government’s “borrowing” of the Social Security surplus is an accounting fiction; it “borrows” the surplus from itself, not from workers. As we conservatives have often pointed out, the workers do not have a property right to SS benefits. FDR and Congress deliberately set it up that way, trying to make sure that SS would be constitutional. The Supreme Court at least once has affirmed that there is no property right. So there is no debt that could be the subject of litigation.

By the same token, that part of the “gross debt” which is “owed” to future SS beneficiaries is not owed to them in the sense that they could sue for it were Congress to abolish SS or reduce benefits. Since when can a borrower abolish his debt without declaring bankruptcy? If he could, we could justifiably call his debt “fake debt.” So the SS “debt” is fake debt – just as the SS Trust Fund is a fake fund.

If a person believes that the Trust Fund is a real fund, he will be misled by “Clinton ran surpluses” to believe that Clinton put money aside for future SS benefits. That’s the real deception. The claim that Clinton ran surpluses is true.

Craig Steiner, by his own say-so, is a software developer, not an “economist.”