Of course, you will have to get your employer to go along with this. You don’t want him automatically making deductions from your payroll and sending it to the government. If he’s not one of the few progressive employers allowing people to handle their own taxes, and if he resists, tell him you’ve adopted 10 or 12 children who are now your dependents and make up some Social Security numbers for him, if you must. Borrow kids from the neighbors and invite the boss over for dinner. Welfare recipients did this for years and it worked for them, sometimes.

Take heart. The government has already greased the path. With minor contributions of six or seven percent of your local education budget, they’ve already made certain most of their young employers can’t add or subtract. There’s a good chance that you also work for someone mathematically challenged. After all, he let this happen in his community when he was paying more than ninety percent of the bill for education.

If the above plan doesn’t pan out, tell the IRS you’re setting up a “contingency” fund and you need all of your money for this emergency measure. You never know when grandma might be hospitalized, heating bills triple, or gas prices go up. If the federal government can do it, especially when they have the mechanism to raise billions overnight with honest borrowing from wealthy investors looking for Treasury securities, you are also allowed such a fund from taxes. It’s good business. It’s necessary to the defense of your home and the protection of your family. Tell them your investing in research on a “star wars” project to shield your house.

You might even become famous enough to be on CNN’s Regretta Van Cistern “Burden of Spoof” program. If you do, I’ll walk in front of the studio and try to get picked as one of those mummies who just sit there filling space and looking like jurors while Regretta, Howard and some piped in TV talking head sound off. Maybe my presence will lend moral support.

Don’t forget, you can always dazzle them with homey stories the way Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) does in the Senate. Or is that filibustering? Anyway, if you don’t have stories of you own, take one of mine rendered in Byrd fashion.

Payroll tax story:

When I was a young man in my twenties, starting a research company in Chicago, I would ride the South Shore train from Hyde Park downtown every day. Getting off at the Randolph terminal, I would walk four or five blocks South to the Santa Fe Building at Jackson and Michigan.

The winter of 1961, twice a day I would pass the Brooks Brothers store where they had a $100 suit in the window. A sign below this suit proclaimed that it was: “For the man who wants to make $10,000 a year before he’s Thirty.” Boy, that was me. I was already on my way to that figure.

At the time, I was making about $8,300 a year, with clients responding well to our new form of qualitative market research. I could see myself in that suit in no time. The ad really worked on me.

Another thing I remember was that by September or October of that year my twice monthly check grew by about ten percent. Our accountant said it was because I had already paid the limit on the Federal Insurance Contribution Act (FICA tax). It was about $870 that I had paid in by that time, and the cut-off point must have been about $6,200.

Today, workers pay FICA taxes until they reach $80,200 a year. For people with that salary or more it’s about $12,270 paid to Social Security and Medicare. A little different isn’t it? I wonder how long it takes the up and coming to get to that figure every year and how much they must be pulling down if they reach it before the New Year.

Drawing conclusions Senator Byrd would never draw

You don’t hear those complaining about changing demographics, people living longer and fewer contributors to the supplemental retirement system, talking about these differing rates, do you? I wonder how it balances out when you figure in the depreciation of the dollar, how little it buys today in this age of minimal inflation and since Nixon took us off the gold standard?

Also, while you are being told fictitious stories about “76 million baby-boomers” that do not show in the Census figures, you should know that I was born in the Thirties, during the Great Depression. The decade from 1930 to 1940 produced less than half the population rate of increase as did decades on both sides of these years. There were damned few of us. Still, we carried our weight and supported the Social Security system without a hitch. Why are we worried about seven or eight million extra children produced between 1945 and 1960 or 1965 by lusty servicemen returning from World War II?

Have you ever thought that Clinton might have missed the decimal point in his State of the Union Address of 1998? The press, having an aversion to numbers, never questioned it, and now we have a fairy tale “the sky is falling” fear story that allows the Beltway Bandits to make small changes, like raising the age of retirement, that increase revenue into their favorite slush fund. A story they still refer to, but usually without using the number any more.

Another thing, the survivors in my age group are the people entering full retirment today and up until about 2007. Because we’re so few in number, we can’t be too much of a strain on Social Security even if, because of medical advances, some of us are living a little longer than the actuarial experts might have expected. How come you don’t hear anything about us? Could it be that Social Security has always had the ability to adjust to demographic changes? That the system was built with the flexibility to function that way with minor alterations? How many adjustments have been properly made since its inception, without contributing to a slush fund?

One thing I can guarantee you. Social Security’s only major problem is the federal government itself. A government that steals its surplus, spends that money wherever it pleases, and then forces taxpayers to pay again by redeeming bogus UOU bonds placed in black hole debit accounts mislabeled as “trust funds.”

This would become obvious if Social Security eventually turns to its trust fund at a time that miraculously gets pushed further and further into the future. Of course, that time will never come because there is no “baby boomer” threat. But you are paying more in payroll taxes partially because the pirates are making adjustments that yield more booty. Adjustments like raising the cap from $72,200 to $80,200 in the last two years in order to “save” the system. By the time its found out, the crooks will have paid off their portion of the national debt, and you’ll be left with a Social Security Trust Fund in excess of $4.5 trillion (2012) in bogus double taxation babble bonds. You don’t hear them talk about that, do you?

Every dollar they steal from entitlements requires an equal bond deposit on the trust fund side of the debt. And don’t forget to figure in the compound debt added yearly under the guise of “interest” handed the trust, no cash involved.

You don’t hear President Bush or anyone mention the increase in this other “unavailable” side of the national debt when touting how they are going to use your Social Security money, do you?