Accounting nuances and IOUs

I've been thinking over the past couple of days about the Social Security trust fund. A lot of conservatives and Republicans have been arguing that the trust fund doesn't exist because, in accounting terms, the assets of the trust fund (treasury bonds) are netted against the liabilities of the overall government. This is a nice, nifty argument, but a simple review of corporate accounting standards shows that to be false. In corporate accounting, if a subsidiary owes some liabilities to a third party then you can not always consolidate the subsidiary. In this case, the government should not properly be consolidating the trust fund by netting the treasury bond balances against each other because: (1) the government shouldn't consolidate in this manner since the majority of the risk is borne by the beneficiaries (this is a de facto, not de jure distinction) and (2) the Federal government has not guaranteed the liabilities of the Social Security system, therefore assets and liabilities should be separate from the overall government balance sheet.