In this book, Al Gore comes right out and tells you, right off the bat, that his number one priority, his first goal, is to “eliminate the public debt by the year 2012.” No ifs, ands, or buts about it, he’s going to use a healthy part of your Social Security and Medicare payments to do it. Enough to pay off at least $3.6 trillion of a debt that he and his cronies ran up in the last twenty years. Run up first to ruin the Russians by outspending them in the Cold War and then just for the hell of it. Because they could do it.

He is also promising to take a good chunk of your gas taxes, airport and airline taxes, unemployment taxes and a couple of dozen other entitlement fees you pay. All money that’s supposed to be used for other purposes. Other services you pay for and should get. Things like highway repair. But none of it comes close to the giant chunk of your retirement money that he’s going to steal.

If you enjoy having your retirement and health care money used for this purpose, then you should rush right out and vote for Al and Joe. They are not making any bones about taking your entitlement money to do this. They call it a surplus. Money to do with as they please, like fealty paid feudal lords. Fealty paid by slaves who didn’t work as many months of the year as you do to pay taxes to the government.

If you like the idea of using your retirement money to pay down the debt rather than forcing your government to stop wasting its revenue on pork-barrel projects, favors to contributors, international banking and a new world government—then vote democratic. It will guarantee your place in the New World odor.

If you feel that handing the Social Security Trust Fund more debt in the form of bogus bonds to substitute for the money stolen will somehow “strengthen” Social Security—then vote democratic. Every cent they take from Social Security today and tomorrow increases the trust fund side of the debt, indenturing your children even further. It’s your kids who will have to redeem these bonds.

If you think that only the federal government should enjoy such luxuries as the 29 percent yearly increases in their Thrift Savings Plan investments in the stock market—then vote democratic. Support hypocrisy.

The Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office do not predict a surplus from income tax money, without Social Security, until 2002. Even if that comes true it’s only a small amount. Bu then, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman will have taken more than $350 billion of your entitlement money. And the amounts will get bigger every year.

This plan is why the democrats in the Senate put the dead hand on two “lock-box” bills that passed the House of Representatives by almost unanimous votes.

And speaking of the Senate, everyone who can afford it or check it out at the library should read David Schipper’s new book; “Sell Out”—the story of how the Senate put the dead hand on Clinton’s constitutionally required trial after impeachment by the House. Mr. Schipper, another disillusioned Chicago democrat like myself, was the Chief Counsel for the House of Representatives and the bearded fellow we all saw on TV reading the indictments to the Senate. He was in every back room meeting and feels you should know what went on there.

If you are even going to bother to vote this election, and if you do not want to see your retirement money going down the tubes, your alternative on the other side doesn’t seem a whole lot better. At a time when the republicans should have breezed into the White House, they put up George W. (Wimp?). His daddy told him that a plan like the government’s Thrift Savings Plan, where two million federal employees invest in the stock market, might be a good campaign story. Bubba doesn’t seem to understand “why” it’s a better idea than the Gore-Lieberman plan.

Maybe George W is saving his big guns for the debates, if they can even agree to hold these question and answer forums.