Then they were lying to you. The entry might have been there but the money wasn't. That isn't trying to excuse reckless spending but it's just noting that the money wasn't there.
See the accounting report FD linked above.
And here is a little history for you about how the SS surpluses came about:
"Before the confetti from Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday is entirely swept away, we might pause to remember one of his signature achievements -- back when Democrats and Republicans actually spoke to each other.
It was in some ways a less entertaining time, but some things actually got done.
One of them, in 1982, was a bipartisan overhaul of the finances of Social Security. A commission headed by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., and Alan Greenspan, later the Oracle of the Federal Reserve, reduced some benefits and considerably increased Social Security taxes. Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill signed off on the deal.
As a result, for 30 years, Social Security piled up considerable surpluses -- surpluses that were supposed to be there for the system when the Baby Boomers started to retire and begin decades of looking for their old Beatles records. Since by law Social Security can invest its surplus only in Treasury notes, it now holds $2.6 trillion in U.S. bonds -- leaving it in position to make full payments until 2037.‡
Hardly any other entity in the world, public or private, can call itself a multitrillionaire. That's why John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute in Seattle, calls Social Security "the best-funded program in the federal government."
Still, in the midst of our current budget crisis, Social Security has just gotten thrown in with its bankrupt bureaucratic brothers. Last weekend on CNN, former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, co-chairman of President Barack Obama's budget commission, explained that his critics were "jerks" and declared, "So I'm waiting for the politician to get up and say, there's only one way to do this, you dig into the big four: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense."
But as the television show that featured the original Oscar the Grouch used to explain, one of these things is not like the other.
One of these things has the moral and legal commitment of the U.S. government for $2.6 trillion.
There is a suggestion out there that because the $2.6 trillion is not piled up in gold bars somewhere, but is only a file of U.S. government IOUs, that it doesn't actually exist. Since the Social Security shortfall, like the Medicare shortfall, actually has to come out of the general fund, critics claim the situations are the same, and urge that Social Security's retirement ages should be jacked up until the books balance.
But if all those T-notes in the Social Security trust fund are just pieces of paper, we'd better keep that news from the other people holding them.
"If we pay off China for its purchase of Treasury bonds," notes Burbank, "we should pay off the American people for their purchase of Treasury bonds."
The Social Security surpluses were used to help pay off years of federal deficits. When the prospect of federal surpluses first appeared, Bill Clinton urged, in his 1998 State of the Union speech, that the money be used to "save Social Security first." Running for president in 2000, Al Gore wanted the Social Security surpluses put in a "lockbox," an idea that struck people as so hilarious it became a punchline.
Instead, hundreds of billions of dollars of Social Security taxes -- a flat tax that the government stops collecting above certain incomes -- were used to help balance three major George W. Bush tax cuts. As Harry J. Holzer, public policy professor at Georgetown University, put it seven years ago,
"Thus the Social Security surplus -- financed by payroll tax increases on the lower and middle classes -- has been used to fund income tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit high-income people."
Time to live up to Reagan's Social Security deal | OregonLive.com