Quote Originally Posted by Hurst01 View Post
They took an amazing amount of the money out of what was available and never put it back. At the time it didn't make a flying fig of difference to me because of my age. I am sure that most of you were young at one time and know young people don't care about retirement. Any of you ever remember hearing it?
President Johnson created the ‘unified budget’ in the late 1960s to disguise the real cost of the Vietnam War.[6] [7] President Johnson did not want to ask for income tax increases to pay for several ambitious government programs of that era (the Vietnam War, the Great Society War on Poverty, the NASA Space Race). Putting surpluses from Social Security overwithholding “on budget” (adding them to the general operating budget of the United States Government) so the overwithholding could be used to pay for other government programs would make the federal budget appear balanced. The resulting debt to Trust Funds would be presented “off budget.”

In 1967 President Johnson appointed a Commission on Federal Budget Concepts which in its October 1967 report proposed a unified budget to do this. Johnson submitted the first unified budget to a Democratic Congress for Fiscal Year 1969 scheduled to begin on July 1, 1968. Thus was born the practice of using Social Security Trust Fund surpluses – or “Intra-governmental Holdings of Debt” to hide the size of the overall federal deficit.