If We Pay Peter Peterson More Money in Interest Than He Pays for Buying New Bonds, Is It Supremely Irrelevant That He Paid for His Bonds?

That's the question Megan McArdle raises in her Bloomberg column condemning efforts to raise Social Security benefits. McArdle tells readers:

"Now, I don't want to get mired in the tired old arguments about whether the trust fund is "real" -- whether it's a stupid accounting abstraction or a profound moral promise on the part of the U.S. government -- because this obscures the actual point we need to be concerned with: If we want to pay Social Security beneficiaries more money than we are col...