If the government had real trust funds, there would be no need for lock-boxes. Real trust funds are lock boxes, and a lot more. But our crafty politicians want to imply a vault, safe deposit or strong box, where the money can't be pilfered. As such, it's just another admission that they're stealing our entitlement money.

Any real trust fund is already a lock-box. And any lock-box bill that actually becomes law would have to be set up as such a trust fund. Congress would probably name it the Social Security Lock-Box Trust Fund, and then we'd have two Social Security Trust Funds. One with real funds, and the other with nothing but debt in the form of "special obligation" nonmarketable bonds, currently exceeding $1.070 trillion and being 18 percent of the national debt.

Lock-box is simply another misuse of the English language by our distinguished representatives who like to play with words. They call these new bills "lock-boxes" so that they do not call attention to their phony trust funds.

Every year, we get another lock-box bill. Every year, it passes the House by a phenomenal bipartisan majority. And every year it dies in the Senate. This is becoming a definite pattern. Of course, it also allows every representative in the House to tell his constituents, and brag on TV if he gets the chance, that they've "protected Social Security funds." It's not their fault if the other side of the team turned down the bills and they never became laws. And the Beltway Bandits go right on stealing the surpluses at the current rate of about $300 million a day.

One of the latest lock-box proposals is House Resolution #2, the second bill to be introduced by the new 107th Congress in January. It passed the House of Representatives on February 13, 2001, by a vote of 407-to-2 and was sent to the Senate where it will die, just like the others.

In May of 1999, we had H.R. 1259 that passed the House by a vote of 416-to-12 and then died in the Senate where it was filibustered to death by Democrats. People like Senator Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) got to recite Greek tragedies on the Senate floor for hours on end, until everybody was bored to death, and the subject was finally retired forever to committee.

In June of 2000, the House passed another lock-box bill, H.R. 3859, by the phenomenal vote of 420-to-2, but again it died in the Senate. It does not take a majority to filibuster a bill, only 40 percent, and the Senate Democrats had more than that many to object to this bill.

Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) holds the distinction of being the only House representative to vote "NAY" on all three of these lock-box bills. Until this year, he held that position along with Martin Sabo (D-Minnesota) but Mr. Sabo voted "present" this time around, relinquishing his "nay" vote to Bob Filner (D-California). Three other democrats voted "present" and 19 did not vote at all.

The stall this year will, no doubt, begin with senators unwilling to vote on this new lock-box bill until President Bush's new Commission to Study Social Security makes its report five or six months from now. That puts us into fiscal 2002, and delays everything further. And next year is an election year. Who's going to take on the "third rail" during an election season?

Meanwhile, and recognizing what would probably happen, Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) introduced yet another lock-box bill, H.R.373, that would lock up Social Security and Medicare surpluses this fiscal year. The bill is known as the Lock-Box bill for Fiscal 2001, but it was referred to the Committee on Rules, and in addition to the Committee on the Budget, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker of the House. More delay.

Personally, I think all of these lock-box bills are elaborate political stage shows. Grandstanding, to make it look like the politicians are doing something, keeping their campaign promises, or working hard on the complexities of Social Security. It's all just a sham, a shell game, and a stall to keep reform under wraps.

How hard can it be to stop stealing the money? It certainly wouldn’t cost anything, unlike most of the other crazy proposals to set things right.

How difficult can it be to set up a real trust fund? One like their own privatized Thrift Savings Plan that invests in the stock market through Barclay Bank of Great Britain. Since most of the members of Congress are also lawyers, drafting such a trust fund can't be costly or too time consuming.

At one time, I even thought that such a trust fund could be managed by the federal government. I no longer believe this. Not only are there valid reasons to keep government out of the investment picture, but the Beltway Bandits have sufficiently demonstrated their inability to be trusted. Our best bet lies with trustees in the private sector.

And the New York Stock Exchange certainly isn't the only place honest trustees might invest large sums of money. Social Security's trust could become a bank, federally insured of course, holding most of the single family home mortgages in the country. It could loan money to other nations and corporations directly. There's no need to buy stocks somebody else already owns. But then, that would be competing directly with Washington's banking buddies wouldn't it? The very bankers our government needs to support the New World Odor.

No, I'm sorry, I just don't believe that anything the Beltway Bandits do with Social Security is going to improve things for working Americans. At most, we can expect more fear stories and tactics, like the baby-boomer hoax, to fatten the goose that lays the golden eggs for our greedy politicians and bureaucrats. When dealing with the greatest economic rip-off of all time, you cannot leave solutions in the hands of the thieves themselves.