Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Tuesday argued that Republicans aren’t telling the truth when they say Social Security is starting to run out of money, even though the Congressional Budget Office sees the program running out of money at its current rate of spending in a few decades.
“We got Republicans going around the country, lying, as they occasionally do,” Sanders told steelworkers during a campaign stop in Iowa on Tuesday. “And they’re saying Social Security is going broke, we have to cut Social Security benefits.”
“Now just stop and think about it, forget politics. Tell me how somebody can go around the country when we know that millions of people, seniors, disabled vets, people with disabilities, people who can’t make it on 12, 13 thousand dollars a year?” he asked.
Sanders spoke just a day after the Congressional Budget Office released a budget outlook that said Social Security’s huge Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund would start to run deficits starting in 2018.
According to the Social Security Administration, the combined Old-Age and Survivors Insurance fund and the Disability Insurance fund ended 2015 with about $3 billion less than it had at the end of 2014.
Social Security has been spending more on benefits than it’s taken in for the last five years, and the interest earned by the roughly $2.8 trillion in the trust fund has helped keep the trust fund growing.
But projected spending increases are expected to take up all the interest earnings, and then eat into the trust fund itself in 2018, according to CBO.
CBO predicted in December that based on those current projections, the entire trust fund will be gone by 2029.
