Peter Diamond, Professor of Economics at MIT and president-elect of the American Economic Association, along with Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institute, right off the bat make the common mistake many make in not considering the interest handed the Social Security Trust Fund with absolutely no money involved.

In talking about the big surpluses Social Security continues to run, these economists state that: "Last year it (Social Security) took in $163 billion more than it spent."

There's little doubt that Social Security will reach that profit margin in the near future, but it hasn't yet. The Social Security trust fund did increase $162.7 billion last year, but $64 billion of that came from annual interest against the previous year's balance. Social Security actually had a $98.7 billion surplus in fiscal 2001.

A great many people make this same mistake. It is rather incredulous that the government compounds its crime of stealing our retirement money by adding interest on top of the embezzled retirement money. It's even more incredulous that we are buying debt with our surplus contributions. We would be much better off if they simply stole the money and ran.

Setting this aside, these two economists go on to show that each of the three methods the commission recommended for investing a portion of a worker's payroll taxes are loaded with bad policies and economic mistakes. I will not try to repeat these problems because you should read their analysis for yourself.

Just remember, Professor Diamond and Peter Orzag come to the conclusion that investing our surplus contributions somewhere somehow is the proper course, but not the Bush method. The faults they find with the Bush plans are found while accepting the false ideas that the trust fund holds real assets and the baby-boomers are an authentic problem—both major scams that make matters even worse than what these scholars are pointing out.

Like other reputable economists, these two claim that Social Security faces few problems. It's working just fine and whatever problems can be seen, at worst, could be solved by less than one percent increases in payroll taxes.

In other words, ninety percent of what you hear from politicians are nothing but scare stories meant to cover the evil deeds they are doing with your retirement money and often meant to gain even more booty.

You might also want to read Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot's "Social Security: The Phony Crisis" University of Chicago Press, ISBN #0-226-03544-1.