When it comes to Social Security, the Washington Post's editorial board is indefensibly stupid

The Washington Post's editorial board keeps saying indefensibly stupid things about Social Security. Here's the latest. In an editorial titled "To get the national debt under control, start with the retirement state," the Post said:

"The trust fund concept is misleading. Both programs are, and have always been, pay-as-you-go, where taxes collected from current workers fund benefits for current retirees. Social Security and Medicare both add to annual deficits right now, even though the trust funds still have positive balances on paper."

Three moronic sentences strung together with mind numbing stupidity. The Post is counting on you being as ignorant and brain-dead as it is.

Take the sentences in order. The "trust fund," says the Post, is a "concept" that is "misleading." No. Social Security's (I'm ignoring Medicare, which is another matter entirely) trust fund is a real account with real assets. Nothing about it is in any way misleading, and it's not difficult to understand for anybody willing to make a minimal effort.

Social Security and Medicare, continues the Post, "are, and have always been, pay-as-you-go, where taxes collected from current workers fund benefits for current retirees." False. Social Security, which began in the 1930s, was initially conceived as a pay-as-you-go system, but way back in the 1980s it was clear that it could not continue to work that way, because a time would eventually come when current payroll tax receipts would be insufficient to cover current benefit payments. Many decades ago the Greenspan Commission recommended, and Congress enacted into law, additional payroll taxation beyond what was needed to cover then-current benefit payments, in order to build up a massive trust fund to help cover payments when the baby boomers eventually retired. The trust fund has been used exactly as anticipated, exactly as designed.

The Post adds that "Social Security and Medicare both add to annual deficits right now, even though the trust funds still have positive balances on paper." On paper? On paper? That's like saying your own savings or retirement accounts are only "on paper." The Post must think that only big bags of $100 bills count as real assets. How does one even begin to break through such stupidity?

The Post also seems to not understand the distinction between debt and deficit, even though from the standpoint of national finances the distinction is crucial. Deficit is an often misleading statement of annual cash flows. Debt is the accumulated amount the country owes to its creditors. Debt is what matters, period and full stop. And Social Security has never added a penny to the debt. Not a single penny.

Unfortunately, people tend to use the terms deficit and debt interchangeably, but they aren't the same thing. When Social Security was running huge payroll tax surpluses and building up its trust fund, those surpluses had the effect of masking the size of the government's overall annual budget deficit and making it seem smaller than it actually was. The two are supposed to be reported separately, but they were usually combined. Social Security's big surplus, when combined with the government's other revenues and spending, made the size of the government's overall deficit seem somewhat smaller than it was.

Once Social Security finally began tapping (as intended!) the trust fund to help pay retirement benefits, the situation was reversed. Now Social Security makes the overall annual budget deficit seem larger, because Social Security is actually taking in less in payroll taxes than it needs to pay benefits. But no worries: the trust fund makes up the difference. Again, as designed.

The key to avoiding any confusion is to concentrate on what actually matters, which is not the deficit but rather the debt. The debt is not the accumulation of reported annual deficits. Over time, the debt can grow faster or slower than the reported deficits would suggest.

It's the debt that just passed $40 trillion. It's the debt on which we pay interest. It's the debt that needs to be paid back (or, more likely, rolled over). And it's the debt that has not changed a bit as a consequence of paying Social Security benefits.

As I said, Social Security has never added a single penny to the debt. It's important to understand why that is so.

Thus the Post is emphatically wrong when it says, in the editorial's headline, "To get the national debt under control, start with the retirement state." But so far, the "retirement state," at least the Social Security component of it, hasn't been a driver of the debt at all. The only way that would change would be for the government to start directly borrowing money to pay benefits—something it has never done, and almost certainly won't do. Social Security is entirely self-funded. Social Security benefits are currently paid by a combination of payroll tax receipts and trust fund redemptions that don't change the debt one iota. It's crucial that you understand this. (Follow the links I provide above and below if you want to learn why.)

And changes to the system to extend solvency, which are long overdue, almost certainly won't affect the debt either. They will probably involve things like higher payroll taxes and higher caps on FICA taxes. (Currently earnings above $184,500 aren't subject to payroll taxes; that cap can be bumped up or even removed entirely.) None of this involves direct borrowing. None of it adds to the debt.

Please realize that it's within your ability to understand how Social Security is funded, even if the Post does not. I wrote an extensive piece in 2013 that goes to great lengths to explain these matters. That piece got a fair amount of notice at the time. The well known economist and commentator Dean Baker recommended it to his Twitter followers. See also this and this.

If the Post can't weigh in on the very real challenges facing our retirement systems without asserting abject falsehoods, it shouldn't say anything at all. We need an intellectually honest and informed discussion of these challenges, and the Post isn't up to the job.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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