I take it you mean the "unified budget". The same thing Nixon used and every president after him until 1986. To say Johnson "stole" the funds is misleading.
It started under Johnson. Before then, Social Security was off budget. Basically it's own account. When SS is running a surplus, bringing in those funds hides the actual deficit. That's why Johnson wanted those funds. He wanted to hide the cost of the war. You may not consider that stolen, but that would put any corporate accountant in jail. It's called, co-mingling funds. So now, to the tune of about 2.5 trillion dollars, we are going to have to come up with money to pay back to SS from general revenues for several years.
So once you start that, how do you stop as long as SS runs surpluses? It covers up the size of the true deficit.
Hopeflully now that SS is pretty much going to be running deficits until about 2037 when it goes bust, we can take it off budget again. Might as well have honest books before the program starts sputtering.
