“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on Aug. 3 if we haven’t resolved this issue (raising the debt ceiling).  Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it,”  President Barack Obama said during a recent CBS interview. 
The president is using scare tactics — threatening to attack the incomes of millions of seniors — to get his way to increase the debt ceiling.  He is acting like the child who says, “You play by my rules or I’ll take my ball and go home.” This is a political ploy so Obama can push America closer to bankruptcy. The Democrats want to spend more of our money, and they can only do that if the country goes further into debt.
In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Social Security into law. Initially, Social Security was established as a trust fund. For those of you who are not familiar with trust funds, they are financial accounts established for a person or group of people and not to be used by anyone else or for any other purpose than for which the fund was established. Social Security’s trust fund is supposed to have $2.6 trillion in it, according to the Social Security trustees, but that money has been borrowed by the government and replaced with worthless IOUs. 
Rather than keeping Social Security away from the government’s budget, it has been used as an accounting gimmick to hide the fact that the government is further in debt than it wants us to believe. Rather than pay back the money borrowed from Social Security, the government is threatening to cut benefits. 
Social Security accounts for nearly 18 percent of the federal debt. Defaulting on the federal debt means defaulting on Social Security. This is a total fiasco brought on by the government’s wasteful spending without oversight on the part of the American people.  We must limit and reduce the government’s spending instead of allowing it to borrow more money than it can repay. The government must pay back Social Security, not borrow more.
If you or I spend too much, borrow money to pay for our purchases and max out our credit cards, creditors eventually will cut us off. We will then have to keep our spending within the limits of our earnings. If we continue to spend beyond our personal debt ceilings, we will go bankrupt. The government has reached that point and it is about to drag the American people and Social Security into bankruptcy.
If the debt ceiling is raised and Obama raises taxes, the government can just keep spending our money on their pet programs, which they have done in the past. There is no willingness by the Democrats to reduce spending, pay back Social Security and balance the budget, which means Congress cannot spend more than it receives in taxes.  
The government wants us to believe that it is borrowing from China to support Social Security. I think this is a lie because, according to an article published on the Christian Science Monitor’s website, China holds just under 10 percent of all U.S. debt. Oil-exporting nations as a group, including Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, account for about 2.6 percent of U.S. debt. Japan is owed 9.6 percent. Yet Social Security is owed almost as much as all of these put together.
The government thinks Social Security is its personal piggy bank, and our seniors are being held for ransom.  When are we going to stop this madness?

Calderone is a conservative who lives in Midway. He is a professional salesperson and for 30 years has written articles for trade publications in various fields.