Some time in a strange land long ago that used to be called the United States of America - sometime before Bush 43, Cheney and Rove decided it didn’t matter if we were united or not as long as their team had the power - back in that hard-to-remember time before this Crewe came along - we had a “balanced budget” and were “generating surpluses” in the Federal budget. 

Al Gore thought we could do even better - he understood that the budget was not really balanced or generating a surplus - even though the printed material said it was.  He knew (as, really, everyone in Congress and the executive branch knows) that it was only the surplus from Social Security taxes compared with Social Security benefits currently being paid that was making the Federal budget look like it was in balance.   It truth absent Social Security the budget was still in deficit even during the later Clinton years.  

Bush 43 knew that truth too, even as he was screaming “It’s your money!!”.   He knew there was no money, yet he promised to raise even less money.  It was the old right wing concept that if you starve the Federal treasury the Congress would have no option but to cut “spending” - which in their minds meant spending money on the social safety net - Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  They got their tax cuts for the rich and the Federal budget turned into a yawning chasm of deficit as they intended that it would (aided by Bush’s Iraq war that he didn’t even consider asking us to pay for) - but they forgot the second part.  They either didn’t or couldn’t cut spending - we’ll never know how their late night truth telling to each other determined that outcome.

In the virtual world of a Gore presidency things might have been different.   Gore would have tried to reverse the “unified budget” initiated by Nixon that combines the real “operating” budget of the country with the Social Security program that has been generating more cash than it spends for all these years, thus covering up the true size of the operating deficits.  Gore would have tried to give us a budget we could possibly understand and in so understanding the problem, deal with it.  But of course the Supremes had other ideas.   So, instead, we got the various fantasies of the past nearly 8 years.  

What we are going to get next, given that the Social Security “cash profit” is about to turn into a “cash loss” in 2015, is I believe part of what the falling stock market is trying to tell us.   Things ain’t going to be looking so good.  In fact, if it turns out, as I expect, that the world will start to be unable to produce enough oil to meet its on-going requirements in 2010 or so - and will produce less and less every year thereafter - then this fiscal mess caused in no small part because we failed to segregate Social Security from the real Federal budget will be exacerbated severely.