SOCIAL SECURITY AND THE DEFICIT

WHEREAS, the Bush administration is using funds generated by the Social Security payroll tax to finance the general operations of government; and

WHEREAS, the surplus generated by Social Security taxes was meant to pay for benefits in future years when the number of workers supporting each beneficiary will be greatly reduced; and

WHEREAS, use of Social Security funds to pay for the general operations of government such as weapons procurement, farm subsidies, interest on the national debt and other federal spending is a misuse of the payroll tax; and

WHEREAS, the Bush administration is spending Social Security taxes on programs completely unrelated to retirement security while at the same time demanding that Congress reduce the tax on income from capital gains; and

WHEREAS, the inclusion of Social Security receipts completely masks the true size of the federal deficit:

RESOLVED, that the AFT support the proposal of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to remove Social Security from the general federal budget and reduce Social Security payroll taxes so that the system is returned to a pay-as-you-go-basis; and

RESOLVED, that in order to prevent the resulting increase in the true federal deficit from triggering the automatic budget-cutting provisions of the Gramm-Rudman Act from slashing even more money from vital social programs, that the targets in that Act be recalculated to reflect the true state of the federal budget; and

RESOLVED, that Social Security be protected from this kind of misuse in the future by removing it from the budget and allowing the trust funds to accumulate a one-year surplus prior to reduction of the existing payroll tax.