A Tax Receipt

Wouldn't that just be the first line?

You're not going to find Social Security under income taxes because income taxes don't pay for that - FICA payroll taxes do.

I understand what's going on. The "tool" is a piece of junk. It's acting as though Social Security is a separate self-funded program, independent of the rest of the Federal government. This may be true structurally, but as far as I know everyone agrees that the Trust Fund will soon be broke (if it isn't already) and that it's actuarially impossible for the Fund to remain solvent, unless one were to increase FICA tax rates about 50%. Without such an increase (which is highly unlikely) Soc. Security will inevitably be comingled with the rest of the budget. I assume the tool treated Medicare the same way. It's even less likely that Medicare remains solvent as a self-funded program. What fiction!

@various

your assume the laws around SS remain static. They don't. SS is trivial to fix. Raise the retirement age and increase the upper wage threshold for when FICA taxes are taken out. Reagan did it.

Anyone who says SS is in serious trouble is delusional. It's defense and medical costs that are more difficult to fix and what should be focused on. Actually I would say that defense is easy to fix - slash it by half to start off with. The problem is that both democrats abd republicans are addicted to defense spending and wars.

Tim,

I'm not saying that the SS problems are hard to fix. I'm just pointing out that: a). the tool Arnold is referring to ignores the inflows and outflows for SS, and b). because we're not sure exactly how SS will be modified in the future, it makes sense to throw both it, and Medicare into the general budget pot.