Yesterday’s New York Times editorialized:

It’s the time of year when the trustees of Medicare and Social Security release their annual reports on the programs’ financial health. And that means Americans are likely to be bathed in a fog of political rhetoric that makes it hard to sort out fact from fiction.

Here’s the bottom line…

The Times then proceeded to bathe its readers in fog:

According to the reports, the date of insolvency for Medicare’s hospital fund was pushed back, from 2017 to 2029, because of cost-saving measures in health reform. As for Social Security, without any changes, it will be able to pay full benefits until 2037 and partial benefits after that, the same estimate as in last year’s report, despite temporary setbacks from the recession…

A lot of attention will be paid to the finding in the Social Security report that payouts will exceed revenues in 2010 and 2011…That doesn’t endanger benefits, because any shortfall can be covered by the trust fund.

No. It. Can’t. Because there are no funds in the Social Security “trust fund.” There are no funds in the Medicare “trust fund.” As Fortune magazine’s senior editor-at-large Allan Sloan explains in today’s Washington Post, those “trust funds” contain nothing but “funny money.”

In a 2006 blog post titled, “Sometimes, Governments Lie,” I offered the following proposition:

If the government knows that there are no assets in the Social Security and Medicare “trust funds,” and yet projects the interest earned on those non-assets and the date on which those non-assets will be exhausted, then the government is lying.

That still seems correct to me: the whole idea of the Social Security and Medicare “trust funds” is a lie. An institutionalized, ritualized lie that the U.S. government tells the American people. Perpetuated by both political parties, and others with an interest in hiding the reality of these programs’ unfunded liabilities from voters. One that many journalists uncritically repeat.