The Great Betrayal: How Congress Broke Social Security and Left Us the Bill

There is a clock ticking down on the American dream. This week, the Social Security trustees released their annual report, a dry document filled with the kind of actuarial tables that cause eyes to glaze over. But its message was a five-alarm fire: the Social Security trust fund, the bedrock of retirement for 70 million Americans, is now projected to be insolvent by 2034. At that point, unless something changes, every retiree, every disabled worker, every surviving spouse and child will see their benefits automatically slashed by nearly 20 percent. The parallel crisis facing Medicare is even worse, with its hospital fund running dry a year earlier.

The headlines are predictably sterile, speaking of “demographic challenges” and an “aging population.” We are told, with a clinical detachment, that there are simply fewer workers paying into the system to support the massive wave of retiring Baby Boomers. This is true, but it is not the whole truth. It is a convenient, bloodless explanation that ignores the real story, the one that should be shouted from the rooftops. It is the story of a great betrayal. Social Security is not just a victim of demographics; it is a victim of the United States Congress, which has treated its trust fund like a personal piggy bank for decades and is now poised to blame the looming catastrophe on everyone but itself.

Let’s be perfectly clear about a fact that has been willfully obscured for a generation. The Social Security trust fund is not filled with cash sitting in a vault. For decades, the Social Security Administration has taken in more in payroll taxes than it has paid out in benefits. What did the federal government do with that surplus? It “borrowed” it. It spent it on everything else—wars, tax cuts, highways, you name it. In exchange, the Treasury Department issued special, non-marketable Treasury bonds back to the trust fund. These are, in essence, IOUs from one part of the government to another.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a matter of public record. A 2005 analysis, when George H.W. Bush was long out of office and his son was president, laid it out in plain terms, noting that the government had, at that point, already borrowed $1.7 trillion. The report warned that beginning in 2017, the government would have to start backing up these paper promises with “real money” as more people retired than worked.

Well, 2017 came and went. And the “real money” never materialized in a way that fixed the underlying problem. Congress—under both Republican and Democratic leadership—has continued to kick the can down the road, never truly reckoning with the debt it owes to the American worker. They spent the surplus, and now that the bill is coming due, they are pointing the finger at demographics, at a new “Fairness Act” that rightly restored benefits to public servants, at anything and everything besides their own decades of fiscal malpractice.

If Social Security is insolvent, it is because Congress made it so. They are the ones who are at fault, and it is time they started paying it back.

The solutions being debated in Washington today almost entirely ignore this central betrayal. The conversation is framed as a stark, binary choice between two painful options. The first, often favored by fiscal conservatives, is to cut benefits. This could mean raising the retirement age yet again, or slashing the cost-of-living adjustments that help seniors keep pace with inflation. It is a solution that asks American workers to pay the price for Congress’s profligacy.

The second option is to raise revenue, primarily by lifting the income cap on which Social Security taxes are paid. Currently, high-earners only pay into the system on the first $176,100 of their income; every dollar earned above that is exempt. Making all income subject to the payroll tax is an overwhelmingly popular idea that would shore up the system for the rest of the century. But this, too, is treated as a political third rail.

The current administration under Felonious Punk has vowed not to cut benefits, but has shown no interest in raising revenue, a politically impossible paradox. This inaction is the most cynical position of all. It is a deliberate choice to do nothing and allow the automatic, across-the-board 23% cut to take effect in 2034, a cut that will devastate millions of seniors living on fixed incomes. Any politician who refuses to champion a plan to increase revenue is, by default, endorsing this catastrophic outcome.

The great betrayal is that this crisis was entirely predictable and entirely preventable. The trustees themselves note in their report that taking action “sooner rather than later” would allow for less painful, phased-in changes. But “later” is now here. Decades of congressional cowardice have left us with a 10-year fuse on a demographic and fiscal time bomb.

It is time to change the conversation. This is not a debate about “entitlements.” This is a debate about earned benefits. It is a debate about whether the promises made to generations of American workers who paid into a system their entire lives have any meaning. The money wasn’t lost; it was spent. And the people who spent it have a moral and fiscal obligation to pay it back.