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FIRST THINGS FIRST
STOP SOCIAL SECURITY'S BLEEDING |
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Everybody talks about how Social Security has been producing more funds than it needs, but that this will not last, mostly because of the upcoming baby-boomer retirement myth. Yet, no one asks how much the supplemental retirement system has been producing in excess of its needs, how much surplus it generates all of the time. And the numbers are enormous. I've been following these surpluses for years and have even written a "how to" article on finding them in the Treasury's web pages for yourself. Neither republicans nor democrats will easily give up these slush fund surpluses that they've been enjoying. In fact, they will not even mention them.
The decline in Social Security’s surpluses since 2001 is a quick indication of the job market. People are losing jobs, taking pay cuts, or accepting work at much lower wages which results in less payroll tax receipts for the government and less surplus for Social Security. Once the economy picks up, if it ever does, these surpluses will shoot up over $100 billion a year. This money is gone forever. Spent. We have no chance of getting it back, although the government would like us to believe that it’s possible to both spend and save the same money. That’s just part of their fraud or con game. Dancing along the Third Rail of politics: No doubt, President Bush would love to use these surpluses in his argument for “personal or ownership accounts” because the money is certainly there to divert, but he doesn’t dare. Not only does it go against the fear story of Social Security going “bust” or “bankrupt,” but should the surpluses even be mentioned all sorts of questions might arise and the entire scam of pretending to “borrow” this money to use on wars and pork barrel spending is liable to unravel. And Social Security is just the tip of the iceberg. Similarly, every American worker already has a personal/ownership account with Social Security and it would be much more forthright and honest if Bush called his plan “investment” or even IRA accounts, but he doesn’t do this for much the same reason. If anyone ever started to inquire into where the Social Security surpluses have been “invested” they would find phony trust funds holding nothing but non-negotiable nonmarketable bogus bonds that now compose more than 22 percent of the national debt, can only be redeemed with taxpayer money, and are a double taxation scam the government has been running. During the summer of 2001, when the Social Security trust fund was a hot topic, dozens of experts and economists all told us the same thing. They said that if the poor dears in Since taxpayers supplied these surpluses in the first place, at some point in time they will be buying back their own money, plus annual interest that has been handed the false trusts without money involved because they do so by simply depositing more bogus bonds in the phony trust, increasing your indebtedness. It’s a continuation of the “borrowing” falsehood. It’s just as though American workers lined up at the U.S. Treasury to walk in, plunk down bags of their hard earned sweat equity, and said; Here, give me some debt and don’t forget to add annual interest so I can pay you back even more. It’s that ludicrous. Who in their right minds would trust politicians to invest their money? We’ve already wasted years allowing the government to get away with this scam and they are never going to give it up without a massive outcry from the public. They tried to stop themselves once when they spent years debating “lock-boxes” for Social Security’s surpluses, but like borrowholics the temptation and easy access to the money was too much for them, they couldn’t stay away from the loot. It was doomed from the start anyway because real trust funds are, by their very nature, lock boxes. All they accomplished was to make their fraud more obvious. A real trust fund costs virtually nothing to set up. If we had one for Social Security’s surpluses, if we could deposit real money in it and even if the assets just sat there, perhaps making simple interest, we would be more than 100 percent better off than we are now. And we would have plenty of time to argue about issues of Social Security reform.
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