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This payroll tax revenue is supplemented by a transfer of the income tax revenue that results from taxing a portion of the benefits received by higher income individuals, bringing the current program receipts to 10.9 percent of taxable payroll. In addition to the 10.6 percent payroll tax for the Old Age and Survivor Insurance (OASI) program, there is a 1.8 percent payroll tax for disability and a 2.9 percent payroll tax (with no limit on the taxable wage) for Medicare, bringing the total payroll tax rate to 15.3 percent. Social Security is essentially a pay-as-you-go program in which current tax revenue is used to pay current benefits. Unlike a private pension, private stocks and bonds are not accumulated to pay future benefits. The revenue received by the Social Security program is technically credited to the Social Security trust fund, but any of the receipts that are not used to pay current benefits are loaned to the government to finance other government activities. Although the trust fund is therefore nominally invested in government bonds and credited with interest at a government bond interest rate, it is essentially just an accounting mechanism for keeping track of past Social Security surpluses. Since the current inflow to the trust fund exceeds the actual cost of current benefits (expected to equal to 9.1 percent of taxable payroll in 2005) , the trust fund balance is now increasing. When annual benefits exceed the inflow to the program (excluding the interest received from the Treasury) in about 2018, the government will have to sell bonds to the public to finance benefits. That those bonds are technically associated with the trust fund does not change the fact that they will be government borrowing that increases the budget deficit and crowds out private investment. Although the political focus is on the projections that the trust fund balance will reach zero in 2044, the more important date is 2018 when the government must begin borrowing to pay benefit