Could this work?

[R13]

WASHINGTON "? The most important question, perhaps, about President Bush's $700 billion financial rescue plan isn't when or if it will be approved by Congress -- but how's it going to be paid for, and by whom.

American taxpayers would appear to be on the hook for the U.S. Treasury buying up the hundreds of billions of dollars in bad mortgages that are weighing down the U.S. economy, with the intention of reselling them to investors when the economy and housing prices bounce back.

But there may be another option.

An estimated $661 billion is sitting in a little-known Social Security Administration account known as the Earnings Suspense File (ESF), and it's doing nothing but earning interest -- more than $50 billion a year that is available to Congress to spend any way it likes.

Like, to help fund a bailout?

The ESF, established in 1936 at the outset of the Social Security Administration, exists to collect W-2 earning reports from employers that carry incorrect or fake Social Security numbers.

The General Accounting Office estimates that up to 10 percent of W-2s have invalid name and number combinations. The ESF exists, in effect, to put that money in escrow in case a future claim is made against the account.

The fund was in the news as recently as 2005, when the GAO cited it in a congressional investigation as evidence of growing identity theft.

But even with $661 billion, the total ESF account represents only one-half of 1 percent of the overall Social Security trust fund, which has more than $2.2 trillion in deposits.

So why hasn't this idea been floated?

"To take some money from the Social Security accounts without assurance that it could be put back would be inappropriate," said Barry Bosworth, senior fellow of economic studies at the Brookings Institute.

"The government shouldn't kid itself," he said. "Spending an asset is the same as issuing debt. Given the level of discussion about what's going on, that [idea] would blow their minds up."

Social Security officials predict that the trust fund will go broke by 2041 if the system isn't reformed. But since the 1980s, Congress has used the fund's surplus to spend on whatever it has wished, in return for special-issue bonds to be repaid at a later date. This bookkeeping device allows Congress to borrow money from the Social Security trust fund that would have otherwise been borrowed from the financial markets.

So why not do the same thing to bail out the nation's ailing financial underpinnings?

Bosworth says it's still borrowing taxpayer money. "If the money in the Social Security fund is not available for other expenditures," he said, "then you're still borrowing the same amount of money. He said $700 billion in spending would have to be cut to make a difference.

"Congress just has to face up to this stupid thing," he said, referring to the bailout.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,431422,00.html

That is eaxctly why SS is about to go broke now. "Hey,look....these people paid into this to retire on, they will never notice if we hand some out to other programs." This guy should be hung in public.

[R13]

Just pisses me off that there is all this money that could help the SS problem and strengthen it or go to something else beneficial. Instead it just sits there as we fall into economic turmoil and possibly a depression.

[imported_GC1]

This money, and the interest it draws should be held in reserve for SS only in case it is needed in the future to fill the void of some shortfall. As we all know, as the baby boomers retire there will be a great strain on SS because there won't be enough taxpayers to keep it up to snuff.

SS was set up for the ones that worked...not the children allowance, not SSI, not dis-ability ,not a spouse. To allow for each one of those it needed to be re-formulated and the funding increased. Doesn't seem like it ever happened.