I like the people who complain there’s nothing in the Social Security fund but IOU’s. Guess what? Unless you have a petroleum tank or grain silo in your back yard*, all your wealth is IOU’s. Your securities are pieces of paper at most, more likely these days just bits an a computer. Ditto your bank account. Got gold? Unless you have the physical metal, you have a piece of paper promising to deliver you gold. If the seller doesn’t abscond or go bankrupt. If you actually have the gold, what you have is some intrinsically useless yellow metal. Gold makes a good medium of exchange precisely because it’s good for so little else. Unlike silver, which became monetarily useless 50 years ago because it was in so much demand for photography (yay, digital cameras!) or platinum, which is in so much industrial demand the price goes all over the place. And if you think I’ll trade my last can of hash for your gold, guess again. I’ll wait till you starve and come get it at my leisure.
So suppose we socked money into the Social Security fund all along and never touched it. What would that mean? We’d be paying today’s benefits with money stashed in, say, 1967. What does that mean? Whatever goods and services created that wealth have long since been used up. So even if we “fully funded” the Social Security fund, the money would be almost entirely notional. The only possible meaning is that the wealth is contained in the total wealth of society. A truckload of $100 bills in a Mad Max world is just campfire fuel.
*Oh, by the way, grain rots and petroleum degrades. Just sayin’.
