No, they weren't. There was never a point in the history of social security where you could continue making the payments to existing retirees on the basis of the saved up money they paid in themselves so that a future generation could decide that they would prefer to both not pay into and not receive social security.
There have been years when working people paid more into the program than retirees withdrew, i.e. when less than all of the money paid by the current generation went immediately to the previous generation, but that money was never even close to enough to fund the promised future payouts.
Moreover, Congress "borrows" the money in the sense that the Social Security Administration holds it as government bonds rather than cash, but then the Social Security Administration gets the interest on the bonds.
The problem is, that was never even close to enough money either way, because the program was configured from the outset to transfer most of the money from current working people to current retirees instead of investing it at interest in order to make the future payments to the people paying into it. This could have been slightly better if the "trust fund" was invested in stocks rather than government bonds because they pay more interest, but it still wouldn't have been near enough. And if even that was the case then the government in those past years couldn't have spent as much money because it would have lost that huge sink for government debt, in which case all the people currently collecting social security would have had to have paid higher taxes for the level of government services they received.
Meanwhile using the money from existing workers for existing retirees not only doesn't actually fund the program, it only even fails to implode as long as you a) never intend to wind the program down and b) the ratio of working people to retirees never decreases. But the ratio of working people to retirees did decrease, because people started having fewer kids and living longer, so now the unfunded "trust fund" isn't just insufficient to make the payments to the people who are currently paying in, it's soon not even going to be able to make the payments to the people who are currently retired, because it's now shrinking rather than growing as a result of more people collecting for each one paying in.
No, they weren't. There was never a point in the history of social security where you could continue making the payments to existing retirees on the basis of the saved up money they paid in themselves so that a future generation could decide that they would prefer to both not pay into and not receive social security.
There have been years when working people paid more into the program than retirees withdrew, i.e. when less than all of the money paid by the current generation went immediately to the previous generation, but that money was never even close to enough to fund the promised future payouts.
Moreover, Congress "borrows" the money in the sense that the Social Security Administration holds it as government bonds rather than cash, but then the Social Security Administration gets the interest on the bonds.
The problem is, that was never even close to enough money either way, because the program was configured from the outset to transfer most of the money from current working people to current retirees instead of investing it at interest in order to make the future payments to the people paying into it. This could have been slightly better if the "trust fund" was invested in stocks rather than government bonds because they pay more interest, but it still wouldn't have been near enough. And if even that was the case then the government in those past years couldn't have spent as much money because it would have lost that huge sink for government debt, in which case all the people currently collecting social security would have had to have paid higher taxes for the level of government services they received.
Meanwhile using the money from existing workers for existing retirees not only doesn't actually fund the program, it only even fails to implode as long as you a) never intend to wind the program down and b) the ratio of working people to retirees never decreases. But the ratio of working people to retirees did decrease, because people started having fewer kids and living longer, so now the unfunded "trust fund" isn't just insufficient to make the payments to the people who are currently paying in, it's soon not even going to be able to make the payments to the people who are currently retired, because it's now shrinking rather than growing as a result of more people collecting for each one paying in.