After a particularly dismal performance, Yankees Manager Casey Stengel inquired plaintively: "Can't anyone play this game?" A similar question can be asked of all the economists, anchormen and politicians who keep telling us that we are paying down the national debt when all we are doing is playing the old game of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.

Even if Congress decides to use the surplus to "pay off" the debt, instead of cutting taxes, where would that money come from? It would be borrowed from the Social Security Trust Fund. If a private company tried a similar kind of "debt reduction," no doubt it would attract the attention of the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The way the Treasury achieves this legerdemain is simplicity itself. The Social Security system levies a payroll tax on working Americans and these monies when received are credited to the Social Security Trust Fund. At the moment the amount of cash being accumulated greatly exceeds the payments being made by the fund to current retirees.

The Treasury has two choices: leave the money in cash in the fund, or borrow the money and use it for some other purpose, such as paying bills or paying down the public debt. If the Treasury borrows the money, it gives the trust fund a promissory note repayable at some future date or on demand. The Treasury has chosen the latter course, so that part of the assets of the Social Security Trust Fund consist of promissory notes from the Treasury. This is not a trivial number. It totals more than $1 trillion today.

There is legitimate debate about whether the paying down of the public debt is a good or bad thing. The essential fact is that total debt of the United States is not declining, and your children and mine, about which we have heard so much, will still have to redeem the notes the Treasury gave to the Social Security Trust Fund when the cash is needed to pay the baby boomers' retirement benefits. Al Gore's famous "lock box" is full of IOUs -- very high quality notes to be sure, indeed the obligor has the highest credit rating in the world.

That said, where will the government get the cash to redeem these notes when the call comes to pay out benefits to tomorrow's retirees? Chances are the Treasury will have to borrow the money in the public market to raise the cash to redeem the notes. The process will then be reversed and the public debt will go up and the private debt will go down. The only way to find the needed cash is to reduce expenditures -- an unlikely event -- or raise taxes. However it turns out, our children will have to cope.

While spinmeisters can talk about "book entries" or moving cash from one pocket to the other, or quote President Franklin Roosevelt, who explained our national debt by observing "after all we owe it to ourselves," the fact remains that the Treasury will have to produce the cash at some future date to pay off these notes. Unlike your household, the government can print the money to pay off the debt, but with inflationary consequences.

All of these bookkeeping entries which pass the money from one pocket to another may be legitimate and even an intelligent way to run the country, but it is not a way to reduce the liabilities of the Treasury. None of this fancy accounting puts the future of retirement benefits in jeopardy, but neither does it protect our children and grandchildren from managing a national debt in the future.

C-SPAN shows us that lots of politicians know how to play the spin game, but maybe they should have listened to Gertrude Stein, who in a burst of economic insight once wrote: "The money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pocket after a change; and that is all there is to say about money." All one has to do is to substitute "debt" for "money" in Ms. Stein's sentence and you really do know how to play the game.

Mr. Wriston is the former chairman of Citicorp.