Here's a statement I can't agree with, found in this post at EconLog (that I linked to via Vox Baby):
However, there is one important difference between keeping Social Security as it is and switching to privatization. Under the current system, Social Security's liabilities will continue to be funded by payroll taxes. However, under privatization, the transitional debt would be repaid using -- guess what? General revenues! In other words, privatization is a vehicle for changing Social Security's medium-term funding mechanism from payroll taxes to income taxes. It is exactly what the Left presumably wants, and what the Right presumably opposes.
What I can't buy is the statement "Under the current system, Social Security's liabilities will continue to be funded by payroll taxes." The beginning of the end for that property of the current system began the minute we invented the idea of the "trust fund." As I explained in this previous post:
The "Trust Fund," of course, is nothing but IOUs that the government writes to itself. It, in fact, does not represent assets accumulated by the government, but rather the "promise" that we will spend the surplus payroll taxes today, and pay for future benefits out of general federal revenues (i.e. the income tax).
Privatization or not, we will be paying social security benefits out of general revenues just as soon as outgo exceeds payroll tax collections sometime in the next decade.
UPDATE: Tom Elia at The New Editor and Donald Luskin at National Review Online make related points while taking on Paul Krugman (here and here). (Hat tip to Steve Antler at EconoPundit.)