There's a dirty little secret about all those Medicare and SS trust funds that the government doesn't like to tell you. There is no trust fund, so they'll begin going bankrupt in 2017, not 2050 like they're telling you.
The trust fund is a filing cabinet in West Virginia that contains paper IOU's from the Treasury. All the "surplus" for Medicare and SS is spent in the general fund every year with those paper IOU's (they're not even treasuries, just worthless paper) stuffed into the filing cabinet year after year.
So while most people think there is a trust fund earning interest that can be drawn on after the two systems begin going into the red, in reality there isn't. So the real bankruptcy begins in 2017. Every dime spent on Medicare and SS after 2017 will need to be borrowed from the private sector or foreign investors in order to keep funding them. If you think deficits are big now, just wait until those payments are no longer lowering the deficit but are adding to it since the surplus is currently counted to lower the deficit.
