Wrong, we are taking the money from the trust fund (please read SS Trustee's report) to cover the shortfall in SS payments. The treasury has borrowed money from the trust fund and the Government has to borrow more to replenish the trust fund. But once, the trust fund is gone, government cannot borrow to replenish the trust fund by law. That is when the payments will be cut 25%. The SS is able to pay 75% of the current payment till 2100 under existing law without the trust fund. Please read SS Trustee's report; not any CATO (a libertarian thinktank)'s report who are advocating SS as a Ponzi scheme and are advocating for complete elimination of FICA taxes and push everybody to mandated 401(K) and IRAs. In my opinion SS should invest in the market (low cost index funds, bond funds, and the US treasuries) instead of solely investing in US treasuries. Of course, it has to be done slowly instead of injecting trillion dollars into the market to skew the market.
In his 1999 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton proposed transferring $2.7 trillion in budget surpluses to the Social Security trust funds. He further suggested investing 20 percent of those funds in the stock market, likely in index funds, aiming for about 14.5% of the total trust fund assets to be in index funds. Everybody ridiculed his ideas, including Democrats. I believe we would have been better off if we did that.