As predicted, Bush’s plan for individual investment accounts is dying on the vine. Now, you should prepare for the onslaught of cockamamie plans for a long term “fix” to Social Security, an insurance program that doesn’t need any fixing at all.

These new proposals will come from the republican as well as the democratic cults that have the same huge stake in the outcome. And most of these proposals will really not be anything new but merely a rehash of the same old baloney we’ve heard before, this time under new titles and camouflage.

At least two points must be firmly fixed in your mind while experiencing this onslaught of supposedly new ideas that will in all likelihood carry over into the mid-term elections of 2006.

These two indisputable facts are as follows:

1). Changes in payroll tax contributions are immediate: The only rational reason to change anything years ahead of time is to build a reserve. And any kind of reserve, no matter what it is and what it looks like, is exactly what you cannot trust the government to manage. They’ll spend it and it will be gone when you need it. They’ve already proven that they cannot be trusted with extra money.

In its sixty-eight year history of taxing American workers for their guaranteed minimum subsistence retirement insurance, payroll taxes have already been changed/increased forty-nine times (See History Chart where each line is a change in at least one of the basic taxing elements). It is childishly crazy to be talking about what will happen if things stay the way they are today if changes are not made in the next thrity-eight years or whatever.

Once an increase is enacted, cash rolls into government coffers as soon as your next pay check. It’s that fast.

Hypothetically, if the members of the entire highly questionable “76 million baby-boomer” myth were to all retire on the same day of the same month in the same year there would be no reason to raise payroll taxes much before that day. We certainly don’t need to raise them now.

Actuarial and demographic changes in population do not take place overnight.  

We’ve already seen what happens when the government is given more money than it needs. Just the examples with Social Security should have taught us something by now.

In the Nineties, politicians spent years debating and arguing about “lock boxes” for the Social Security surplus being generated. Teeming with guilt, they tried to stop themselves from stealing these surplus payroll taxes and spending that money elsewhere. What did it get us? The answer is absolutely nothing, zero, zip, zilch, nada, squat. They’re still stealing the surpluses. The temptation is too great for them to resist.

In 2001, when George W. Bush took over the White House, one of the first things he did was to cut income taxes and he has steadily refused to rescind those cuts even when we went to war a few months later. Was he right to cut these taxes at the time? Of course he was.

The year before that, the nation experienced its largest surplus ever, a surplus of $237 billion (by the “unified budget” way of accounting). $87 billion came from income tax overcharges that deserved to be cut. To this day no one wants to talk about where the $150 billion balance came from.

Well folks, the entire $149.8 billion came from entitlements with Social Security leading the pack with a surplus of $94.5 billion in fiscal 2000. The next year, this payroll tax overcharge went up to $98.7 billion, its highest ever.

Just as payroll tax increases immediately put more money in government coffers, a cut in excessive payroll taxes would have immediately, as soon as your next paycheck, put money into the pockets of every worker in the country. Something that might have increased spending and dramatically altered a failing economy. Did George or Congress even think of doing something like cutting these taxes? Did the democrats? Absolutely not.   

The 1983 dramatic increase in payroll taxes came after a year long study by the Greenspan Commission that did not recommend such increases. Instead, it was brought to us by Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Robert Dole who served on that commission and had assumed credibility when they decided on their own to introduce a huge tax increase bill that passed within a month.

This was all after Social Security had small shortfalls in revenue for seven years in a row, was drawing upon its relatively small trust fund, and was doing just fine. But it built panic in Congress and the Reagan administration because the trust fund was not real and the money to pay a small portion of the benefits had to come from other sources like borrowing or cutting discretionary programs and pork.

Today, this same sort of “fix” is being touted as an example of what needs to be done today in order to make Social Security “solvent” far into the future. Politicians point to 1983 as though it's a date to be proud of, to celebrate, and to imitate. Many talk like they want another huge payroll tax increase even though we are already overtaxed and they are stealing the profits.

As a parting shot, what do you suppose “open borders” do to payroll taxes? These illegal immigrants do work for someone don’t they? Are these employers sending in the 15.3 percent taxes due?

2)  There is only one reason to raise Social Security taxes today: And that one reason is to increase the booty for the federal government to steal – a crime for which they should all be in jail.

After reaching a high of $98.7 billion in 2001, Social Security surpluses have steadily declined to $89 billion in 2002, $82 billion in 2003, and finally to last year’s $71.1 billion for the government to steal and spend elsewhere as President Bush readily admits while he waves the Parkersburg backup trust fund papers in the air and calls them “worthless.” He says; “We spent the money,” the American worker’s retirement money. Anywhere else, this would be a confession to a major crime.

This steady decline in money to steal, which in the minds of the Beltway Bandits is a loss of almost $10 billion in 2002, $17 billion in 2003, $27.6 billion in 2004, or a total of $54.6 billion so far with the situation this year not looking any better. It's reason enough for the Beltway Bandits to go ballistic, to wring their hands in anguish and rant their hair, and to start thinking of ways to increase the loot coming in from payroll taxes, to get it back up to the $100 billion a year range. Everyone agrees that Social Security needs serious reform. Just ask them.

The democrats are not truly against the idea of personal investment accounts. They all know that workers would be better off risking their “extra” payroll taxes in some sort of venture. It’s the American way. It’s capitalism at its best. But they are very definitely against the fact that it would take anything away from their cash cow, their annual booty, their slush fund. To fight this, the buc(k)aneers have adopted the Nancy Reagan “just say no” policy and now run about the world telling people that Bush’s plan to “privatize” Social Security will put your money in the hands of people like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, and other crooks. It’s like a mother scolding her children for using words they learned by listening to their parents argue.

Don't you wonder what honest insurance companies and investment houses like TIAA-Cref think about statements like that?

Of course, the idea of diverting some or all of this booty anywhere but the pockets of politicians is a hard sell for a man who has lied us into the unnecessary invasion of another sovereign republic and the murder of hundreds of thousands of people we had already embargoed for more than a decade. People that were starving in an oil for food program that turns out to be somewhat corrupted, had no weapons of mass destruction, and were not the slightest threat to us. An act that turned most of the world against us, defies the Geneva Convention, tortures prisoners of war, and uses depleted uranium that poisons our own troops. A man that dropped us from every meaningful peace treaty and put the fox back in the chicken coop by appointing Daniel Patrick Moynihan to co-chair his committee to study ways of implementing private accounts before 9/11 even occurred.

OK, so he mumbled something about private accounts like the government’s own Thrift Savings Plan when he was running for President, even once saying “good enough for them, but not for us.” But Social Security was so far on the back burner during that campaign it wasn’t even discussed or much of an issue. Who’s going to believe him now? Whatever good it did him years ago has been left in the dust and rubble of his other acts.

Perhaps if the idea of investment accounts had been put forth by someone honest, someone we might find somewhere within the Beltway den of thieves, maybe then it would have a chance. Maybe someone like Ron Paul who is unfortunately another Texan that can easily be labeled as just another cowboy because he sincerely believes in the baby-boomer myth that has never claimed to be “births above normal” and is little more than another booga-booga scare story. There would have been about a 69 million increase to the population, including immigrants, during the same time span anyway and even if there had never been a World War II or sixteen million lusty service people returning to their loved ones in 1945 to begin fostering children by 1946 – a major falsehood that has been put forth as a reason to reform Social Security and one we can afford to put off until we see how many actually show up at the pension doorstep.

So buckle-up folks, you are about to be hit with all sorts of spurious plans to immediately increase your payroll taxes and “fix” a supplemental insurance program that doesn’t need to be fixed. Crazy ideas that will carry right up to the mid-term elections of 2006 but will do nothing to help America ’s workers.

The plain simple truth is that we would all have been better off if George W. Bush or any president that preceded him had just stuffed our extra excessive payroll taxes in a mattress.

What's even more devastating is the unrecognized fact that we would be much better off if the pirates just took the money and ran. But they didn't and they still don't do it that way. Instead, they set up the Pay-It-Again Sam scam by pretending that they merely "borrowed" the money, that the same cash can be both spent and saved. To maintain this fiction, they put "special" nonmarketable bonds (markers) in a trust fund that has no resemblance whatsoever to a real trust.

There's an entire category of the national debt deliberately mislabeled "Intragovernmental Holdings" (IH) to make you believe that "the government owes itself" or one department owes another, the Treasury, or that somehow the government is going to take care of this debt. The entire category is composed of these phony trusts holding bogus markers. And they add annual interest by simply dumping more markers in these accounts at no cost to them.

As it is now, and will remain until the Pay-It-Again Sam scam is exposed and eliminated, we currently owe $1.7 trillion under Social Security and a total of $3.2 trillion as part of the recorded national debt. This IH category is all a scam. There is absolutely no way to pay off any part of the nation’s debt without using taxpayer money to do so. Anything liars try to tell you to the contrary is pure garbage.