Can you believe it? The Beltway Bandits want more of our money. It isn’t enough that they stole $78.2 billion from our supplemental retirement insurance program last year and they’ve burdened all of us with more than $2 trillion in debt. Now they want to cut benefits so there'll be even more to steal.

Every time the government spends Social Security’s surplus/profits they put “special” bonds in phony “trust funds” and then add compounding “interest” that accumulates larger and larger debt year after year. And they accomplish this fraud by simply dumping more nonmarketable debt instruments into the account at absolutely no expense to the government.

Last year, they added $173 billion to Social Security's recorded part of the national debt, and $94.6 billion of that was interest. This year, fiscal 2007, the interest alone will be more than $100 billion.

Here’s what it looks like for the thirteen years that I’ve been keeping track of it. All these amounts come directly from the U.S. Treasury’s Monthly Reports and I’ve got every one of them squirreled away.

No one in their right mind should look at this table and continue to believe the propaganda that the federal government has been spewing out about Social Security being “in trouble,” particularly because of the “baby boomers” who are supposedly looming on the horizon and about to wreck havoc on this insurance program.

And isn’t it interesting how the number of boomers born between 1946 and 1965, the child bearing years of sixteen million service people returned from the various theaters of World War II, have gone from the 76 million Clinton mentioned in his famous “fix the roof while the sun shines” speech – to the 77 million Alan Greenspeak changed it to – and now to “78 million” being bandied about by Bernard Bernanke and the loyal media. Two million more people have been added magically in a vacuum by some sort of immaculate conception. Is this “interest” on birth rates?

Shaken by his recent trip to China, perhaps Mr. Bernanke is confusing the number of baby boomers with the amount his people stole from Social Security in fiscal 2006. (See: Galbraith’s comments on the China trip and my own article “No News – Not Good”)

In fairness to the spinmeisters, the promoters of the Baby Boomer Myth have never said these were 76 million “births above normal.” They just implied it.

The truth is that there would have been roughly 69 million people added to the population in the same time period if there had never been a World War II and the real number of “boomers” may well be only seven point six million (Clinton missed the decimal point), something Social Security can handle easier than the number of illegal immigrants the pirates expect to add to our population. Oh well, who follows Census data?

Much more interesting is the fact that during the decade of the Great Depression that preceded WWII the increase to America’s population dropped in half. It means that a much smaller number of workers supported Social Security for a long period and without a hitch.

It gets worse

First of all, it’s insane to be talking about “76 million baby-boomers” as though they are all alive and about to retire. But that’s exactly what the propagandists like Mr. Bernanke are telling us, is it not?

It’s an insult to our intelligence and an assumption that we have no idea how the insurance business works – how they’re calculating the number of people who will die, how many will probably survive to retirement, how many accidents there will be, how many fires, floods, and how much they have to collect in premiums to make a profit in these statistical ventures.

Here’s a neat table that the Associated Press (AP) put together from many sources that illustrates the point:

Do you see anything that indicates a spike of 76 million baby-boomers? For instance, at the time this table was constructed there were a little more than 4.5 million people at age 40. Each vertical bar is the number of people at one of the years of age. Add them up. How many people reach and go beyond the age of early retirement at 62 or the age of full retirement? The government is raising the latter in order to save payouts – and why? – to save the system from the baby boomers, of course.

Let's say that half of the population survives to retirement age. That would make the "76 million boomers" about 38 million in Bizarro World. In the real world, it would be 3.8 million extra "above normal" people retiring over several years and Social Security could handle that with its hands tied behind its back. Of course, the Beltway Bandits would have less booty to steal and that's their real problem. The federal government is desperate for more money.

How much baloney can we pin on the lusty service men and women returning from WWII? If you're a boomer, how many families did you know with more than seven children? No wonder the movie “Cheaper by the Dozen” has made a comeback.

Secondly, it is also in the nature of the insurance business that the more people an insurer has subscribing and paying premiums, the more customers they sell to, the better it is for the insurance company and its profits. Have you ever heard of an insurance company telling people; Sorry, we're all filled up.

Hence, the Beltway Bandits see nothing wrong with enrolling immigrants, both legal and illegal, as long as they meet the requirements. And the pirates may even change the requirements to accommodate these “illegals” as long as they stop taking cash under the table and send a healthy chunk (14.1%) of their payroll tax to the government to be spent as "off budget" revenue. Spending these dedicated premiums wherever the pirates choose is a crime that would land a private sector insurer in the slammer.

There’s nothing in the Social Security Act of 1935 or any of its revisions and additions that says members must be citizens. Social Security Insurance is a commodity just like any other commodity. This one was meant to make certain that anyone who works in the United States for at least ten years will not be penniless upon retirement. Colonies of retired Americans have already settled in Mexico where it's cheaper to live and are still getting their monthly checks.

What's more, the fear mongers have continually told us that Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system and that this is both unusual and unfair, even though every insurance company in the country pays benefits from the premiums currently coming in and hopes it never has to touch its reserves. Even the government itself is "pay-go" since it lives on annual taxes and brings its books to a zero balance at the end of every fiscal year. That's the same as living paycheck-to-paycheck, the amounts are just bigger.

But Mr. Bernanke and other neocons expect you to swallow this “boomer” story even as we approach the day of reckoning. Spinmeisters with more sense switched to “living longer” and “health care” stories some time ago.

What does this tell you about our new Secretary of the Treasury, a man that would attack and berate his own slush fund just to raise the booty? This third man in the position since Bush took office seems to be pushing for one more last ditch “surge” of the boomer fable. Sound familiar?

Any attempt to “save” Social Security is nothing more than an attempt to garner more money for the Beltway Bandits to steal. Oh, I’m sorry, it’s to “borrow” or “invest.” Isn’t that part of their fraud story con game?

Here’s what you’ve loaned or invested in the last twenty-three years since, in 1983 and under the direction of Senators Robert Dole and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the government changed petty theft into grand larceny.

This is debt folks. It’s not an asset.

The Social Security trust fund now accounts for more than 23 percent of the national debt and there is no one to pay this off except American taxpayers. Our not-for-profit federal government is completely dependent on taxpayer money and must bring its books to a “zero” balance by the end of each fiscal year. They can, however, carry cash (liquidity) from one fiscal year to another with a real trust fund like their own Thrift Savings Plan trust, but Social Security’s trust is not real – it’s a black hole debt account – a scam (See: Confessions).