From a column by LAT columnist Michael Hiltzik arguing that raising the Social Security retirement age may backfire by causing more disability claims, which cost even more than benefits. He makes a good argument, but then there’s this:

That’s because Social Security’s disability fund is much more strained than its old-age fund, in part because disability claims rise sharply at times of high unemployment, like now. You may have heard that this year, for the first time, Social Security’s tax income will fall short of its outgo. (The gap is filled by interest income on the program’s Treasury bonds.)

Pray tell, who pays the interest income? The Feds do. But the Feds are in the red, so the money must be borrowed or raised through taxation.

Hint to Hiltzik: it’s impossible to owe money to yourself.

UPDATE:

I emailed Hiltzik and asked, “Who pays the interest income? And with what funds?” His reply:

Principally income taxpayers–that is, mostly the upper middle class and the wealthy, and therefore the same people who benefited most from borrowing the money in the first place–as the borrowings from Social Security were used to fund the 2001 bush tax cuts.

So he tacitly admits SS is insolvent because the funds to pay the interest do not exist, they must be raised by taxes.

He claims that upper middle class and wealthy will bear the brunt — exactly so, because the bottom 50% of earners pay almost no income tax. ( Bush’s across-the-board  tax cuts took millions of low earners off the tax rolls, by the way.)

His assertion that Bush’s tax cuts borrowed SS is absurd. Why not blame the spending on the Medicare prescription drug benefit or defense spending? It’s one big, upside down pot.

Such is the reasoning from the onetime sock puppet.