Messin' with Social Security

Charles Blahous has a good article over at E21 titled "Why continuing the payroll tax cut could eventually end Social Security as we know it."  Essentially, he poses that by intermingling Social Security with the general revenue fund, the traditional idea of the program as a trust fund for future retirees is broken:

The ongoing effort to partially convert Social Security from payroll-tax-financing to income-tax-financing – by further cutting the payroll tax as a stimulus measure and replacing the funds with general revenues – may in short order put an end to the longstanding conception of Social Security as a benefit earned by worker contributions. The demise of this conception would also threaten the special political protections Social Security benefits have long enjoyed.

Of course if you believe, as I do, that the Social Security Trust Fund is just an accounting trick anyway, this conflation of trust fund and general revenue funds is just semantics.