“The only way you’re going to deal with the debt is you have to do two things–you can’t do one, you’ve got to do both: you’ve got to generate economic growth because growth generates revenue, but you also have to bring spending under control–and not discretionary spending–that isn’t the driver of our debt. The driver of our debt is the structure of Social Security and Medicare…”
Senator Marco Rubio spoke candidly with Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer of Politico regarding the ballooning federal deficit.
Specifically his belief discretionary spending has nothing to do with it….because the culprit is Social Security.
Social Security as it appears on graphs of the mandatory budget is not a representation of any financial drag the program itself has on our budget.
***Social Security is 100% self-funded and legally excluded from the federal budget.***
The “driver of debt” Rubio references exists, but it is not caused by Social Security. It is caused by trillions of dollars being siphoned out of the Trust Fund and used for discretionary spending. The Social Security debt represented on the mandatory budget is the debt created when our government borrows surplus funds for general use and then owes that money to Social Security.
Calling Social Security itself a “driver of debt” is disingenuous. Blaming the deficit on our retirement program is misleading.
And calling for cuts to the program Americans fund completely for ourselves while excusing the discretionary spending that turned our savings into IOUs in the first place is just another way to jam more of our money into the government’s pocket.
