A Stitch in Haste

I was retrolinking to this post about the fraudulent Social Security "trust fund" recently, and I realized that it was over a year old. Which got me to wondering: why haven't we seen the latest annual report from the Social Security trustees -- a report that is as likely as not to declare that 2017 will now be 2016 and that 2041 will now arrive in 2040?

Now we know why:

President Bush and the Senate are at an impasse over the appointment of trustees for Social Security and Medicare, crippling the panel that supervises the two programs. This, in turn, has delayed the annual reports on the financial condition of the programs, which together account for more than one-third of all federal spending.

The short version is that President Bush has simply renominated the current (Clinton-appointed) "public" trustees, but the Senate leadership wants "turnover."

Meanwhile, no annual report.

As the law currently stands, the report -- now three days overdue and counting -- is supposed to be submitted with or without the public trustees' participation. But one wonders: Perhaps the report again contains bad news -- bad enough for an exemption to be crafted allowing the report to be postponed until the trustee nomination tantrums are resolved. Such resolution to occur, of course, sometime after Election Day.

I'm not a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist -- except when it comes to Social Security. The politicians involved don't want that report released. At least not quite yet.

Stay tuned.