I have some shocking news: That money you have in the bank doesn't exist. It's nothing but a worthless IOU. You may not realize it, but when you deposit a check, the bank doesn't take a pile of $100 bills and put it in a little box with your name engraved on the side. In fact, they take your money and lend it out to other people, who may not even pay it back. Your account is nothing but a fiction.
Ready to panic? Probably not. If you have any idea how things work in the modern world, you aren't too worried. As long as the bank has access to assets, it will give you your money when you ask for it. And if the bank suffers some kind of catastrophe, your account is insured by the U.S. government. So you'd have to be a little crazy, or have been watching too much Glenn Beck, to get worried about the absence of that little box with your bills in it.
But that kind of worry is what many of those who don't like Social Security want people to feel. To wit, Charles Krauthammer, who I'm guessing keeps all of his savings in a box buried in his back yard:
When your FICA tax is taken out of your paycheck, it does not get squirreled away in some lockbox in West Virginia where it's kept until you and your contemporaries retire. Most goes out immediately to pay current retirees, and the rest (say, $100) goes to the U.S. Treasury — and is spent. On roads, bridges, national defense, public television, whatever — spent, gone.
In return for that $100, the Treasury sends the Social Security Administration a piece of paper that says: IOU $100. There are countless such pieces of paper in the lockbox. They are called "special issue" bonds.
Special they are: They are worthless.
Also, those bills in your wallet? They're worthless. You can't eat them, and if you lit them on fire they would provide a pathetically tiny amount of fuel to heat your underground bunker as you wait out the cannibal zombie horde outside. All that supports them is a mutual delusion that when you give them to someone, he or she ought to provide you a good or service in return.
Bogus as it is, this argument is a regular feature of conservative rhetoric on Social Security -- George W. Bush tried it back when he was pushing to partially privatize the program. If you can convince people that the government is going to break the promise it has kept for the last 75 years and that they'll never see any benefits from Social Security anyway, it's a lot easier to then convince them that the program should be cut or privatized.
