If there's no such thing as a social security trust fund --- in which case, Reagan and Greenspan's baby boomer FICA tax hike was a huge scam --- then there's no social security crisis. There's just a general budget issue. But in the general budget, Social Security is dwarfed both by other entitlement programs and by a host of other programs.

If you don't believe in the Social Security trust fund, then we should be discussing Medicare. Or out-of-control defense spending. Social Security is irrelevant.

Well, SS and Medicare are over 40% of the annual Federal budget and will quickly rise as the funding issues start appearing.

SS is actually the biggest program and percentage of the annual budget we have. Medicare is second, defense is the third.

[citation needed]

Social Security is 21% of the budget currently. That's:

* at par with Medicare and related medical entitlements.

* rapidly going to be outpaced by Medicare liabilities

* less than we spend on defense

* funded from the Social Security trust fund, unlike those other two

Defense spending is a lot, but it is actually one of the few things that the federal government is supposed to do and it's only 20% of the federal budget whereas medicare and ss are at 60%

That's not true. The OMB's own figures put Social Security at 20%, and Social Security is funded by a dedicated tax. Medicare is a much bigger problem.

Budget comparisons are also subject to both chicanery (playing around with what you consider a defense expenditure) and bias (Social Security is the largest monolithic expenditure in the budget, just like MadMenSeries2.mp4s.zip is the biggest single file on my filesystem, but a small fraction of what I'm spending my disk on).

I will admit that the numbers can be juggled around quite a bit; but from most charts SS is 20% & medicare/medicate/etc are about 40% dod is about 20..

the fact that SS is funded by a dedicated tax doesn't have any relevance.