There is simply too much money involved, and too many individuals and organizations in on the take, the booty, the haul, the crime. Too much for the pirates to give up. The dollar amounts are staggering, in the trillions, with those who benefit ranging from the most powerful elected officials to the smallest clerk or gofer under their umbrella of influence.

And this booty is not restricted to the federal government. It includes the defense industry and the Fourth Estate. Anyone who profits directly from money poured into their pockets through government contract or advertising dollars.

Social Security started out as nothing more than a very workable form of supplemental retirement insurance for millions of American workers, many who were obviously unlikely to set anything aside for their own retirement, and after more than 60 years it still functions that way with hardly a flaw.

But the system has been turned into a slush fund for people who don't need Social Security at all, not for themselves. People who, as a direct slap in the face, have set up perks and benefits for themselves under the same fraud and deception. Even set up their own Thrift Savings Account that functions as a privatized pension fund and hush money for more than two million federal employees, many of whom know exactly how the rip-off is accomplished.

Because the crime was becoming more and more obvious to anyone who studied the National Debt, of which the Social Security Trust Fund now accounts for 18 percent, the Beltway Bandits deliberately instigated a diversion to, of all things, "save" Social Security. To save a healthy system that didn't need saving from anything except the government itself and to carry the crime forward into a debt laundering operation to pay off their own credit card.

In his 1998 State of The Union address, President Clinton introduced a fantastic scare story about "76 million baby-boomers" looming on the horizon and about to wreck havoc on the working man's supplemental retirement system. This was presented as an unusual phenomena resulting from 16 million lusty servicemen returning from World War II and fostering an unusual number of children now in the workforce and about to retire, putting a severe strain on the Social Security system.

No one seemed to bother checking the census data that did not reflect anything more than seven or eight million births above normal. Extra births that only put the nation back to normal after a birth rate that dropped in half during the Great Depression. Instead, the loyal press and media broadcast the false figure everywhere and any time they could. The die was cast, and the nation plunged into "saving" Social Security.

The entire calendar year of 1998 was supposed to be devoted to "fixing the roof while the sun was shining," while the economy was good. But now, it's been more than three years and we have absolutely nothing to show for it except small changes that have increased the booty. We've had town hall meetings, consultants, experts in actuarial data, think tanks and arguments that created even more false stories, rumors, diversions and half-hearted attempts at solutions. Efforts that resulted in nothing more than raising the age of retirement or the caps on contributions so that the booty has been increased.

And we will never have viable solutions for the following reasons:

2. The problem, as well as the solution, are too obvious: If there was ever any true intention of "fixing" the problem, it could have been done easily and long ago. What does it take to simply stop stealing the surplus? Nothing but intestinal fortitude and honesty. We've already had confessions to the theft and several proposed "lock-boxes" that have never been enacted. And what would it take to set up real trust funds that can carry cash from one fiscal year to another, invest in anything except debt, and possibly turn Social Security into a true pension plan instead of merely supplemental retirement? Again, the answer is simple and not costly. Real trust funds are, themselves, lock-boxes. The fact that these solutions have not been enacted, or a real trust fund even proposed, further validates #1 above.

Looking at only a few of these proposals, we find President Bush proposing "personal accounts" much like the Thrift Savings Plan for federal employees. An idea borrowed, no doubt, from his father who was instrumental in setting up the plush plan for federal employees in 1987 while Vice President in the Reagan Administration.

The federal government may have the time and enough people sitting around with little to do who can manage separate accounts for its two million employees, but it's ludicrous to expect this of the private sector. Instead of sending in one lump sum periodic payment for payroll taxes matched and withheld, employers in the private sector would be required to report each employee separately. Plus, if it's like the Thrift Savings Plan, allow each employee to switch options at will. The accounting time and expense for 141 million workers in the private sector would cause inflation. The sheer weight of time and money to manage these private accounts would cause severe increases in the cost of products and services raised to recover expenses.

What's more, this is not the way large pension investment firms like TIA-CREF or SURS operate. These existing pension systems pool contributions just like Social Security currently pools the funds required to meet its obligations. And everyone shares in the profits depending upon the amount they've invested, also just like Social Security. Even expert economists and investors like Milton Friedman do not tell their pension planners where to invest their money, at least not unless they're asked and paid for the advice.

Think tanks like the Concord Coalition and, to some extent, the CATO Institute have proposed privatizing Social Security entirely. Taking the whole Social Security Administration, currently housed in Baltimore, Maryland, and transferring it to the private sector. Of course, this would be extremely expensive and is highly suspect since the current administration is very efficient, maintaining offices in every major city, delivering checks precisely on time, and operating on less than one percent of its budget. It is, therefore, highly unlikely that we could substitute a private organization to do as well if we did go to the expense, but it's totally unnecessary. The major problem does not lie here. It lies in the lap of Congress, the President's staff, unreal trust funds and stopping the theft of entitlement surpluses. Not just Social Security, but all entitlement surpluses.

Others, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the chief architects of the 1983 law that raised payroll taxes far beyond what was required and thus created the slush fund, now advocate, probably out of guilt, returning Social Security to a "pay-as-you-go" plan. This idea would work. If they didn't collect the excess/surplus, the Beltway Bandits would no longer have their largest slush fund.

However, there are at least two things wrong with the idea. First of all, it does nothing to stop the theft of other entitlement surpluses. As of the close of fiscal 2000, the portion of the national debt defined as "Federal Debt" or "Intragovernmental Holdings" through bogus trust funds amounted to $2.268 trillion while the Social Security Trust Fund was about half of that amount at $1.016 trillion. This plan does nothing to stop the theft of surpluses from other entitlements.

Secondly, and more importantly, Social Security never has had the opportunity to operate on the "partial reserve" system that came out of the 1983 increase in payroll taxes. Because the surplus funds have always been stolen, in total, Social Security has not operated on anything except the "pay-as-you-go" system and we've never had the opportunity to see what a partial reserve system might yield except debt.

Had surplus funds been invested wisely, instead of stolen and spent elsewhere, we would now be sitting on at least a $1.016 trillion profit and well on the way to becoming a true pension plan for American workers. Instead, we're more than 130 percent in the hole, partially due to what Mr. Moynihan calls: "the magic of compound interest." In this case, negative interest. More bogus nonmarketable bonds added annually to the pile of debt.

Had these same surplus funds been invested the way the government's own privatized Thrift Savings Plan invests in the stock market through Barclay Bank of Great Britain, yielding an average 28 percent return on investment over the past four years, it could have been an entirely different story. We would be way ahead in the game and would definitely have a real pension fund for American workers.

And the stock market certainly isn't the only place to invest large sums of money, even though the pirates talk as though it was. There's real estate, municipal bonds, and loans directly to corporations and foreign nations. Why should we think only of buying stock somebody else already owns? There's even the opportunity for Social Security to become a major bank. The Social Security Trust Fund could probably hold every single family home mortgage in the country. And who would think of defaulting on their neighbors? But all the cultists talk about is the volatility of the stock market.

Before we cut back payroll taxes, we should at least give Social Security and other entitlements the opportunity to build funds through proper and smart investment in anything except U.S. Treasury securities. Since every taxpayer in the country is responsible for Treasury securities, making them the safest investment in the world, it just doesn't make sense to be awarding ourselves more debt to pay off in the future. Treasury securities, all of them, are nothing more than demands on future income taxes.

It's not too late to give it a try. It's not too late to give wise surplus investment a chance. But it probably is too late to expect our representatives in the federal government to become honest and carry through with something that could be good for American workers, the backbone of this country.