April 12, 2005

Trust Fund: real? Um, yes.

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Oh, okay. Since it appears some of our commenters (well, just one really) are under the illusion that the Social Security Trust Fund doesn’t exist, let me link once again to Dean Baker’s excellent introductory essay on the subject. (PDF here, or HTML here.) We’ve written here on the subject many times, but the background essay will have to do for now. Yes, the Trust Fund exists. Yes, it can be paid back. (One thing that rarely gets mentioned is that Medicare has been redeeming its own Trust Fund bonds for the past year, with no problem at all.) Yes, “defaulting” on the thing will involve very high transfers of wealth from low- to high-earners.

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We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

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