We have been bombarded lately from both the Republicans and the Democrats with facts (?) regarding the debt crisis. It is to the point that I don't trust any politician.

As a senior citizen the statements about whether Social Security benefits will or will not be paid if we have a government shutdown are disturbing, mostly because I think Obama is lying, or more likely talking without knowing what he is saying. I have paid into the "so-called Social Security Trust Fund since its inception in the 1930s, which today should contain about $2.6 TRILLION. The problem is the politicians have raided this TRUST fund and left it with IOUs that today may be worthless. The following is a quote from the Wall Street Journal of July 16, 2011, that everyone should read and absorb. I will be the first to admit that both Democrats and Republicans are the culprits in this situation but we better do a better job of selecting our Congressional members nationwide. At the moment I am comfortable with our present Idaho representatives.

"The trust fund balances only exist in a bookkeeping sense," as Bill Clinton's budget director put it in 1999. They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead they are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures. The existence of large trust fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, have any impact on the government's ability to pay benefits."

The author of that concession to fiscal reality was none other than the same Jack Lew. (Mr. Obama's budget director who stated in February that "Social Security benefits are entirely self-financing.") Mr. Obama's contribution is his admission, however inadvertent, that the government has spent so much that even its own accounting and political fictions are collapsing.

If you had purchased an annuity program from a bank or financial institution and made contributions to it for many years with the expectations that the funds would be invested and the income added to the account balance only to learn that the bank had removed the funds and left a questionable IOU in their place would you be happy? What if the IOU was worthless? Would you vote to re-elect the bank president?

Think about it!

RALPH HALLOCK

Hayden