>   
>   (email exchange)
>   
>   Joe wrote:
>   
>   The argument Stephanie used in the youtube clip is summarized by her here.
>   
>   Here’s the quote:

“Funding Social Security is always and everywhere a political choice. The strongest evidence of this comes directly from the 2009 Annual Report of the Trustees. In that report, they predict gloom and doom for Social Security because “there is no provision in current law that would enable full payment of benefits, once the Trust Funds are exhausted”.

In contrast, the Supplementary Medical Insurance (SMI) Trust Funds are “both projected to remain adequately financed into the indefinite future because current law automatically provides financing each year to meet next year’s expected costs.”

It is that simple. The former is in ‘trouble’ because the government isn’t committed to making the payments, and the latter gets a clean bill of health because the government will always make the payments.”

>   
>   I think this really underlines how arbitrary the projections of financial doom from the
>   Peterson crowd, CBO, and other Government agencies are. Apart from the silly and
>   unreliable projections as far out as 25-65 years from now, the predictions of doom are
>   really based on provisions in law that Congress can change at any time. Which means that
>   just like the fake national debt crisis, the fake Social Security solvency crisis is
>   Congress’s fault.
>   
>   Washington politics at its finest.
>