IOU Social Security - Washington Times
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Monday, August 17, 2009
The Social Security Lie - Must Read for Everyone!
The Social Security Act was passed by Congress on August 14, 1935, 73 years ago.
Read what is being done with our hard earned Social Security payments today.
Read what is being done with our hard earned Social Security payments today.
Social Security is a Monstrous Injustice
Social Security is commonly portrayed as benefiting most, if not all, Americans by providing them "risk-free" financial security in old age.
This is a fraud.
Under Social Security, lower- and middle-class individuals are forced to pay a significant portion of their income--approximately 12%--for the alleged purpose of securing their retirement. That money is not saved or invested, but transferred directly to the program's current beneficiaries--with the "promise" that when current taxpayers get old, the income of future taxpayers will be transferred to them. Since this scheme creates no wealth, any benefits one person receives in excess of his payments necessarily come at the expense of others.
Under Social Security, every aspect of the government's "promise" to provide financial security is at the mercy of political whim. The government can change how much of an individual's money it takes--it has increased the payroll tax 17 times since 1935. The government can spend his money on anything it wants--observe the long-time practice of spending any annual Social Security surplus on other entitlement programs. The government can change when (and therefore if) it chooses to pay him benefits and how much they consist of--witness the current proposals to raise the age cutoff or lower future benefits. Under Social Security, whether an individual gets twice as much from others as was taken from him, or half as much, or nothing at all, is entirely at the discretion of politicians. He cannot count on Social Security for anything--except a massive drain on his income.
This too is an old article, but it holds true today....
Social Security: There is No Trust Fund, Only IOU's
On Tuesday, President Bush had the most bizarre cabinet meeting any president is ever going to have. It was a meeting with an actual cabinet. A filing cabinet. A filing cabinet in Parkersburg, W. Va., to be precise.Strange? Yes. But then again this is a very remarkable filing cabinet. By one way of looking at things, it contains $1.7 trillion dollars. But by another, it contains nothing at all.
Of course I'm taking about the filing cabinet in the offices of the Bureau of the Public Debt that holds the assets of the Social Security Trust Fund.
After the meeting, President Bush declared, "a lot of people believe that the Social Security trust is — the government takes a person's money, invests it, and then pays it back to them upon retirement... It doesn't work that way. There is no 'trust fund,' just IOUs that I saw firsthand..."
In other words, there's nothing there.
The National Ponzi Scheme
We have a national Ponzi scheme where Congress collects about $785 billion in Social Security taxes from about 163 million workers to send out $585 billion to 50 million Social Security recipients. Social Security's trustees tell us that the surplus goes into a $2.2 trillion trust fund to meet future obligations. The problem is whatever difference between Social Security taxes and benefits paid out is spent by Congress. What the Treasury Department does is give the Social Security Trust Fund non-marketable "special issue government securities" that are simply bookkeeping entries that are IOUs.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
In the beginning there was light...
Left: a photo of me
taken drawing at
age 14 in NYC.
WELCOME to my blog!
I'm new to blogging,
so your patience is
much appreciated!
In no particular order, these are a few of the matters that are of interest to me:
- Environmental Issues
- Toxins affecting all of life
- Political Activism
- Local, State and Federal Abuses
- Wall Street
- Consumerism: "consumers" I despise this term (should be - real people)
- Real Power belongs to "We the people": most powerful - most influential over banks and financial institutions
- Art and Creative Expression
- Writing
- Jewelry making
- Organic Gardening
- Animals
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