Yer still losing me, since you seem compelled to shout some ridiculous straw man at me..."distributing outstanding bonds in lieu of benefits"? in order to prop up your own feel-goodness around this one?
Well, fair enough, actually 'Days', was suggesting that [On the first post, I was reading his comments and yours was the first avatar that I saw so I do apologize for that]
"The folks at the USTreasury all know perfectly well how to pay off those bonds... just give them out to the beneficiaries. That's who they are owed to.
Instead of writing checks from the general fund (aka the checking account at the Federal Reserve)
all these Social Security payments could be arriving in the form of US Treasuries"
That's just an absurd proposition.
I want to know to WHOM you want to reassign this debt,
When you sell a stock on the market you don't know who bought it. You don't care. To WHOM do you want to 'reassign' the stock? The highest bidder of course. Same with the bond. The Social Security Trust Fund won't care who buys it.
and WHY you think this reassignation of your dreams, makes sense.
Why is this 'in my dreams'? Where are you getting that from. I'm merely observing that the bonds exist and are held in the trust fund.
How hard is THAT for you to address?
If current benefits owed exceed cash on hand. You'll either default on the obligation or sell the assets in the investment portfolio, which in this case are all bonds.
I haven't been saying ANYTHING more than that. This other poster was just making some bizarre recommendation that the Social Security Trust fund would actually mail the bonds themselves to the Social Security beneficiaries.
You can't sell the bonds in the SS Trust fund (or any other govt trust fund) ... they are in trust!
Me, personally? Of course not, Social Security can though. They were running surpluses, they used the surplus to buy the bonds. Now if they have a deficit they can sell those bonds. Those bonds are an asset of the trust. What did you think they were going to do, just pull those dollars in and store them in Ft. Knox until they were ready to pay them out? No.
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/index.html
"Social Security’s expenditures exceeded non-interest income in 2010 and 2011, the first such occurrences since 1983, and the Trustees estimate that these expenditures will remain greater than non-interest income throughout the 75-year projection period. The deficit of non-interest income relative to expenditures was about $49 billion in 2010 and $45 billion in 2011, and the Trustees project that it will average about $66 billion between 2012 and 2018 before rising steeply as the economy slows after the recovery is complete and the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers.
Redemption of trust fund assets from the General Fund of the Treasury will provide the resources needed to offset the annual cash-flow deficits. Since these redemptions will be less than interest earnings through 2020, nominal trust fund balances will continue to grow. The trust fund ratio, which indicates the number of years of program cost that could be financed solely with current trust fund reserves, peaked in 2008, declined through 2011, and is expected to decline further in future years. After 2020,
Treasury will redeem trust fund assets in amounts that exceed interest earnings until exhaustion of trust fund reserves in 2033, three years earlier than projected last year. Thereafter, tax income would be sufficient to pay only about three-quarters of scheduled benefits through 2086. "
And actually I'm sorry, I was wrong, they're not going to sell them on the bond market. They're going to redeem them at the Treasury and the Treasury is going to issue bonds or tax the public accordingly. But they're still 'selling' the bonds, just
only to the Treasury. Its actually just an indirect way to do it of course, my guess is that the SSA just isn't set up to engage in this sort of activity, the Treasury is, so instead of having the SSA sell bonds on the open market, just deal with the Treasury who already is doing that with newly issued bonds.