Every year, the Social Security Trustees release a report, and every year the headlines say the same thing: the program is running out of money. This year’s report projects that the retirement trust fund will exhaust its reserves in late 2032. Even if the retirement and disability funds were combined, their reserves would last only until 2034. At that point, the report says, only 83 percent of scheduled benefits would be payable unless Congress acts. Look closely at those last three words.“UNLESS CONGRESS ACTS.” The trust funds are projected to run dry. That much is true. But the United States issues its own currency. Since ending the last link between the dollar and gold in 1971, our government has operated under a fiat monetary system. We don’t need a vault of gold, or a stockpile of existing dollars, to authorize federal spending. Payroll taxes finance Social Security under current law. But that is a funding arrangement Congress created, not a limit built into our monetary system. Congress can change how benefits are financed. It could direct general revenue to the program. It could lift the cap on wages subject to the payroll tax. It could do both. The government isn’t running out of dollars. It’s approaching the edge of a rulebook we wrote ourselves. That distinction matters enormously. Under Stewardship Economics, I believe we should judge economic policy by whether it preserves and improves the long-term well-being of our people and the productive capacity of our nation. Money is a tool for accomplishing that. The real limits aren’t dollars, but the goods, services, labor, and resources those dollars can purchase. We can’t print doctors, build homes with accounting entries, or feed people with numbers on a screen. Creating money without sufficient production can cause inflation. That means our responsibility is to maintain an economy productive enough to support its people, not to pretend the federal government is a household balancing a checkbook. And consider what we’re actually discussing. Generations of Americans spent their working lives building the economy we inherited. They built our infrastructure, raised our families, staffed our hospitals, and created the prosperity we enjoy today. Now we’re supposed to tell them that the country they built can’t afford the retirement security it promised? I don’t accept that. Social Security does face real financing challenges, and solving them takes responsible decisions. But those decisions should start with our obligation to the people, not with loyalty to an accounting arrangement. Because the purpose of an economy isn’t to accumulate money. It’s to improve the lives of the people who participate in it. If we have the productive capacity to care for our elderly but refuse to organize our monetary system to make that possible, our failure isn’t financial. It’s a failure of stewardship. And if Social Security benefits are cut, it won’t be because America ran out of dollars. It will be because we chose not to honor the promise. ~CA OpEd: The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the position of Appalachia Insider as an organization. #AppalachiaInsider #StewardshipEconomics #SocialSecurity #EconomicPolicy #RetirementSecurity #EconomicJustice #GovernmentAccountability #OpEd