Bush Plans Heist of $1.7 TRILLION from Social Security Trust Fund

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    Bob Fertik
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April 03, 2005

Call Homeland Security! It looks like Bush is casing the Treasury's bond vault to plan his heist of $1.7 TRILLION in Treasury Bonds.

[White House spokesman Taylor] Gross said one reason the president will make his third trip to Parkersburg in the last 11 months is to tour and be briefed on the Bureau of Public Debt, which employs nearly 1,700 men and women in Wood County.

"This is a center that, in a sense, houses the IOUs of Social Security," Gross said.

About $1.7 trillion in special-issue Treasury bonds that make up the Social Security trust fund are kept at the bureau.

"The president seeks to highlight the fact that the IOUs housed at Parkersburg are a good example of why this system needs to be fixed," Gross said.

Bush has repeatedly dismissed these bonds as possibly worthless:

3/10/05 Montgomery:

This is a pay-as-you-go system. Money goes in and money goes out. There's no such thing, by the way, as a Social Security trust. Some people probably think that the government has taken your payroll taxes and held it for you and then when you retire, they give it back to you. That's not what happens. (Laughter.) The government takes your money and spends it on other things and puts an IOU, a piece of paper, on your behalf, which may be worth something, and it may not be worth something.

3/18/05 Orlando:

The system today, you have no assets. The money goes in and it goes out. There's IOUs. They're paper. But there's no asset base.

Josh Marshall has one simple question that every reporter covering this trip should ask - and keep asking until they get a straight answer:

Does the president believe that those Treasury notes are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States and will he guarantee those funds will be repaid?

This is no trivial matter: Bush could be impeached under the 14th Amendment for questioning the validity of these Treasury notes.

Section. 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.