  :: No, your definition is still wrong. Government funding happens when Congress authorizes spending for a budget. In effect they decree the money into existence, at which point the Treasury authorities the Federal Reserve to go about giving the needed money to whoever needs to be paid for whatever the specific program or service is. The money is created out of thin air as needed. There is not some big government account somewhere where tax 'revenue' is stored before being doled out to pay for things. In fact federal taxes don't even exist in any form that could be turned around and spent; they're receipts proving that a liability has been returned to the government accounting sheet. The national debt is money owed TO the US government, currency issued that is in circulation that will eventually return to the balance sheet through taxation.  All of this returns me to my original point, which is that FICA doesn't, and never has, payed for anything. No federal taxes do.   No one in this country, least of all the members of Congress, grasps how our central bank fiat currency actually works (even though people like Timothy Geithner were prompted to explain it by the Debt Ceiling nonsense, which is why that issue has quietly faded into the background).   