Paul Krugman: About the Social Security trust fund

I see from comments on an earlier post, plus some of the incoming links, that the whole “there is no trust fund, so the system will be in crisis in 2017″ thing is still out there. So I’m just going to reprint what I wrote about this three years ago:

Social Security is a government program supported by a dedicated tax, like highway maintenance. Now you can say that assigning a particular tax to a particular program is merely a fiction, but in fact such assignments have both legal and political force. If Ronald Reagan had said, back in the 1980s, “Let’s increase a regressive tax that falls mainly on the working class, while cutting taxes that fall mainly on much richer people,” he would have faced a political firestorm. But because the increase in the regressive payroll tax was recommended by the Greenspan Commission to support Social Security, it was politically in a different box - you might even call it a lockbox - from Reagan’s tax cuts.