The good news is that 49 million currently retired people are about to receive the largest increase in their benefits in years. An increase of 3.3 percent in cost of living (COLA) adjustment beginning this first month of the New Year is something everyone should appreciate. At least it’s a little money that will not be stolen and spent on wars, invasions, and propaganda.

The bad news is that I spent most of the day waiting for the Treasury to post the national debt figures for the last working day in December. It was afternoon before I realized that the mailman didn’t come to my house because Washington was closed for the day and all federal employees had the day off in respect of former president Gerald Ford or, I suppose, so they could attend his funeral or at least watch it on every news channel.

Turning to the Internet for other news, I found an article published Sunday by the Chicago Sun Times titled “New Congress Brings Hope for Social Security Reform” that really stimulated my interest until I read it.

There’s nothing in this article but high hopes in the new democrat congressional majority. Hopes held by people who still believe in the tooth fairy or that cows can jump over the moon. People who believe that “anything is possible” and rely on someone else to solve issues rather than go to the root of the problem and take meaningful action themselves.

The democrats are not going to do anything to address Social Security’s only major problem – a government that steals its money – the same government that includes the democrats. It’s much too big an issue for them to handle because it affects much more than Social Security. Almost half of the national debt ($3.7 trillion) is related to this same fraud and malappropriation.

Ninety-five percent of the Intragovernmental Holdings (IH) side of the national debt includes the same tools of fraud that have haunted Social Security since its inception. These “holdings” are all special nonmarketable bonds in bogus trust funds. And we’ve already wasted much too much time and energy on phony haphazard solutions to this problem.

Remember the years Congress spent debating “lock boxes?” All when real trust funds are, by their very nature, already lock boxes. Do you want to raise that political football again? During the Clinton, democratic years, it was raised by republicans who had a “contract with America” much as the democrats just won a mandate or midterm congressional election to get us out of Iraq. What good has that done when we’re about to increase the number of troops in that country where we should never have been in the first place?

Do you remember the mileage George W. Bush got out of mumbling “good enough for them, but not for us” a couple of times during the run-up to the 2000 elections? Most Americans don’t realize that he was referring to the government’s own highly successful Thrift Savings Plan that his father started in 1987 as Vice President in the republican Reagan Administration. Many Americans, particularly the young, picked up on that one and started believing it was a hint Dubya was going to do something meaningful about Social Security's “trust fund” rip-off.

What Bush actually did was to put the same master swindlers who set up this scam in 1983 in charge of his commission to reform Social Security. The end result was a lot of babble about “private accounts” where it was recommended that all of the money workers would be allowed to invest was to be considered a loan – paid back by these individuals upon their retirement. Isn’t that nice?

Excessive payroll taxes were considered the government’s money loaned back to the same people that coughed it up. And private enterprise, one of the things that made our capitalistic country great, was transformed into the dirty word “privatization.”

Who can forget Charles Rangel and Bob Gephardt (two democrats) taking to national television during Bush’s first year when he was about to keep his word on reducing taxes? They said “if you want a tax cut, we’ll cut payroll taxes,” but they didn’t mean it. It was just political grandstanding in a futile attempt to stop Bush’s income tax cuts.

Today, Charles Rangel (D-NY) is going to be the new chairman of the Ways & Means Committee in the House of Representatives. What do you suppose we can expect from him? Do you think he's willing to give up the booty?

I, for one, will never forget the summer of 2001 that was spent debating the real problem of Social Security after Paul O’Neill, our then Secretary of the Treasury, on June 19th, told a luncheon group from the Coalition for American Financial Security in the Sky Room of the World Trade Center and later to Sam Donaldson on This Week, Sunday, June 25, 2001, that there was no money in the Social Security trust fund.

It started a furor over Social Security. Everyone weighed in on the “phony” trust funds and the scam was just beginning to unravel when the attacks on the World Trade Center changed the subject.

I was in heaven that summer, firmly believing we were going to get somewhere with the real problem even though no one had yet come to the realization that these “trusts” were part and parcel of the national debt, the same debt that I’m now waiting to see the latest report so I can write another article. The same debt that means the taxpaying public, the same people who donated this excess money in the first place, most someday buy back or pay a second time, plus interest. What I call the Pay-It-Again Sam scam and is just one of the ways we're being defrocked and defrauded.

Frankly, when I went downstairs to fed the dogs on the morning of September 11, 2001, and saw what was happening on television, the first reaction I had was “this time they’ve gone too far.” And I still can’t shake that feeling. That’s how much I trust our government.