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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35888 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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It’s not actually possible for the social security trust fund to be saved. There’s no realistic way for the government to transfer that amount of money to be saved today and available tomorrow. The government controls the money supply. Their decisions effect the price of all financial assets and investing it in stocks would distort all market prices.

A small country could actually save the money by investing in larger economies without distorting prices. Switzerland does this. The US can’t.

In defense of the social security situation, what safe assets is the government supposed to buy? There is nothing safer than US government bonds, which are funded by future tax revenues. Buying foreign or corporate bonds could make sense at the margin, but it opens you up to a lot of risk.

For a large, closed economy like the USA whose inability to collect taxes would not just mean the downfall of its own economy, but the whole world order, I don't think anything else makes sense but relying on your taxation powers.

You could argue that the government should borrow less in general, but that is a separate issue from Social Security.

Yeah, I was going to make a similar point.

So, Social Security has a lot of money, right? What are they supposed to do, put it in a giant mattress and sit on it? No, if they can safely pick up even a few percentage points of return, they should . . . and, well, the safest place to put the money is US Government bonds.

Not just objectively (it is objectively the safest place, but besides that), but because the only way those bonds aren't getting paid back is if the US Government implodes. And if that happens, the entire social security system is dead anyway. So it's not picking up any added risk, just getting some absolutely free percentage points of yearly returns.

There are certainly criticisms one can make of this setup, but "the US social security system has a synergistic risk-free financial relationship with the rest of the US government" isn't one of them.

It doesn't really matter if they put it into US treasuries or cash those are just government liabilities the same as the liabilities the Social Security administration has to it's members. That is my point. The fact US treasuries pay a few percent interest over cash doesn't matter, because the Federal Government is paying money from it's right pocket to it's left.

The only thing that would matter to it's position would be if it offloaded risk or earned interest from some other entity than itself.

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