The social security trust fund is an interesting one. They collect billions of dollars in excess funds every year, which do need to be invested in something. It really would be budget neutral if they bought treasury bonds that were going to be issued anyway, or even bought the bonds on the open market from China and Goldman Sachs. Instead they’re required to buy special non-marketable bonds that were issued only because the trust fund had excess dollars.
It’s like if the U.S. needed to borrow $100 this year to maintain our highways and pay our soldiers, so they decided to sell $100 worth of bonds to whoever wants to invest in them. Meanwhile the Social Security Trust fund raises $50 in excess funds, so the U.S. agrees to borrow (and spend) another $50 from the trust fund, for $150 total.
The trust fund *could * have said, hey, I’ve got $50 I want to invest. Let me buy half that debt you needed anyway. But they don’t.
To start off with, I am politically neutral on this one though liberal overall. I know a lot of liberal groups believe free trade is bad for the poor of the poorer country in the deal, but I am not solid on how exactly that works. That being said, your cites don’t do anything to persuade me of your side either. The first concentrates on the benefits to first world citizens and third world governments, but if it mentions how this is better for third world poor then I missed it.
The second site has one statement saying that one trade deal may increase average workers salaries over the long term, but only if A, B, and C happen. This is hardly convincing evidence. Without more I certainly do not see this as an issue where the facts are solidly on one side of it.
OK, this seems like an argument over accounting semantics. The government has a record of how much is owed to Social Security, and in the mean time spends the cash. So, Social Security has an asset that is backed by the debt of the government as a whole.
I honestly cannot see how this is can be considered a factual delusion on the order of anything else we are talking about, or, in fact, something to be worked up about at all. Maybe I am missing some great significance to it, but so far I don’t see anything.
No question, both of these ideas are ‘generally held by liberals’ in the sense that the idea has more of a home on the left than on the right. But I doubt that a very large proportion of liberals holds either idea, so who really cares?
That’s the thing about conservative craziness: a lot of their crazy ideas are pretty much articles of faith among a substantial swath of conservatives. There’s nothing like that on the left.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
These [Trust Fund] balances are available to finance future benefit payments and other Trust Fund expenditures – but only in a bookkeeping sense… They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures.
[/QUOTE]
:smack: Any bond is an asset of the party holding it, and a debt of the party issuing it.
The Federal government finances its debts by issuing bonds. When the Social Security trust fund buys some of those bonds, they are assets in the trust fund, just the way they would be assets in your portfolio if you bought some. They do not become less real as assets when the holder is the Social Security trust fund.
And on the flip side, when the Treasury sells bonds to the Trust Fund, that just means it has to sell fewer bonds elsewhere. It doesn’t make the Treasury more or less indebted than it otherwise would have been.
The delusion is that those dollars weren’t really spent, they were invested in treasury bonds no different than the way pension funds or foreign sovereign debt funds invest in treasury bonds. Everyone who knows anything knows that treasury bonds are the safest investment around, and the U.S. was going to issue those bonds anyway so no extra debt is incurred. It’s budget neutral.
But they are different. The surplus isn’t invested in marketable treasury bonds, they’re special non-marketable bonds created just for the trust fund, which means it’s creating new debt we have to pay off.
None of what you said is correct. They *don’t *sell fewer bonds elsewhere. The trust fund *doesn’t *buy some of the bonds that would have been written anyway. The bonds *do *become less real assets when they are legally non-marketable assets that only exist because the Treasury is legally required to create them and the trust fund is legally required to buy them.
OK, so they’re special non-marketable bonds created just for the trust fund. So do they differ substantively from the bonds sold on the open market in any way that would support your claim?
Oh gawd, don’t get me started. I am going to punch the next person who says Frankenfood. Especially since all these people nominally bemoan world hunger.
There are anti-vaxxers on both sides. One of the biggest promoter of autism myths was a Republican senator from my state. But straight up magic, like Reiki or crystals? yeah, that does seem to be a liberal thing. Or people who are so far left they reject the term “liberal.”
Vaccines are preventative healthcare, and very cheap, compared to, say, life on a respirator.
There are a few things, like mammograms, that are expensive, and probably over-recommended, but one the whole, preventative medicine saves money.
I agree. The two conservative ones I mention in the OP have about 50% support among Republicans. The liberal ones we have come up with so far seem to be split between low-percentage delusions (crystal healing) and ones where there is enough data on both sides that calling it delusional would be wrong (the stuff Shodan posted).
There do seem to be two issues so far that are solid and held by a large number of liberals.
26% more liberals think GMOs are unsafe rather than safe. compared to an even split among conservatives. So, the conservatives have a huge problem with this too, but this is definitely more of a liberal issue.
The numbers I have found seem similar for nuclear power, though I have not found a poll that asks the question in a way I like.
Of course. We’ve borrowed close to $3 trillion dollars more than we would have if it worked the way you claimed it does.
The net change in OASI reserves last year was $85.6 billion. If we had been able to go out on the market and say “hey, China or any other U.S. debt holder, we’d like to buy back $85.6 billion of our debt and keep it in the trust fund”, do you agree we’d have been $85.6 billion better off than what really happened, which is that we borrowed $85.6 billion more than we were going to borrow anyway?
Of course they do. Revenue and outlays are determined by Congress in this thing called a budget. Modulo getting more or less revenue from the taxes and fees determined by Congress, that determines how much the Treasury will borrow. If it borrows more from the Trust Fund, it needs to sell fewer bonds on the open market, and vice versa.
A distinction without a meaningful difference with respect to this discussion.
That’s a belief, not a fact.
It’s not like the Treasury creates some arbitrary quantity of bonds to sell to the Trust Fund. The Trust Fund determines how much money it has to invest, and the Treasury sells it the appropriate quantity of bonds.
There ain’t nothing special going on here. Really.
Many on the left don’t understand the concept of wealth creation. They think we are basically just dividing a giant pile of resources.
However, the right is under the misconception that only the wealthy capitalists are capable of economic stimulus (job creators), when the true driver of economic growth is demand, not supply.
A small majority of Republicans (admittedly, not an exactly correlation to conservatives) believe humans did not evolve. If you include people who believe “god guided the process” it’s 88%.
With respect to GMOs, you’re right that more liberals than conservatives believe they’re bad for you, and that it’s a majority of liberals. But I doubt that beliefs about GMOs are ‘solid’ - that is, they’re not particularly strongly held. Neither liberals nor conservatives who believe GMOs are bad are eschewing Safeway and Food Lion en masse in favor of their local health food stores in order to avoid the dread GMOs. So I wouldn’t read much into that.
Nuclear power is tricky in terms of assessing the real risks. The odds are way against any given nuclear reactor posing a threat to its surroundings, but if it happens, Fukushima demonstrated that it isn’t just in the Communist world that it can happen in ways that create a long-term disaster.
And to the average citizen, unless you’re willing to invest a hell of a lot more time than most of us have to determine whether something like that could happen here as well, how do you know? And if you can’t know, how is it a stupid idea to think it’s a bad gamble?
So with nuclear power, most liberals think it’s bad, and most conservatives don’t, and these are both unquestionably enduring beliefs. The weakness here is the ‘stupid’ part.
Look, there’s just no way to get this ‘additional’ $3 trillion of borrowing. Over the medium term, the Treasury isn’t going to borrow more than it needs to borrow. (It may sell more bonds than it needs in the short term in order to set interest rates.) One more dollar borrowed from lender X is one less dollar borrowed from lender Y. Due to the excess Social Security taxes collected to finance the baby boomers’ retirements, the Trust Fund has a lot of money to lend, and so it lends it to the Treasury. That’s the story.
That people with these positions are predominantly liberal does not mean that liberals predominantly have these positions.
I live in the Bay Area, where conservatives have no political power to mention, and I don’t see a lot of this. Maybe GMO, but I’ll note that the person who bankrolled the recent proposition about labeling GMO foods was the conservative head of Whole Foods, and it lost. And wanting labeling does not mean one thinks GMO foods are inherently bad.
We note that the leading conservative politicians claim they are creationists and deny global warming; it would be good for anyone who claims that a majority of liberals hold an incorrect position show us some politicians who pander to it.
I think you can do that for the benefits of diversity, a correct position. Crystal power, not so much.