DOUBLE TAXATION & MORE SWEET DEALS
Oh, it feels so good to be raped by the federal government. I can hardly wait for them to do it to us some more. Thankfully, we never have to wait long. In his State-of-the-Union address, the Charles Ponzi of the twenty-first century started out pretty good. Since a regulatory agency has little to do with our booming economy, he honestly put responsibility where it was due when he said, "As always, the real credit belongs to the American people." From that point forward, honesty decreased. "We are doing something that would have seemed unimaginable seven years ago. We are actually paying down the national debt. "(Applause.)
It doesn't seem to matter that at the end of fiscal '99 the national debt had increased $130 billion. Even worse, in the first three months of fiscal 2000, at the end of December and just before this speech, the national debt had already increased another $120 billion. Oh well, who reads the Treasury's Bureau of Public Debt publications? Nor does it seem to matter that Clinton's plan to "pay down the debt entirely in just 13 years" depends almost entirely on stealing entitlement surplus/excess overpayments we make. Evidently, stealing more than $5 trillion from entitlements like our retirement payments is all right if it's for a good cause, i.e., paying off the huge debt he and his cronies have run up in the last twenty years.
Then, about a third of the way through this long sermon, Clinton unveiled his new rip-off scheme: a forced savings plan: "Tens of millions of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck. As hard as they work, they still don't have the opportunity to save. Too few can make use of IRAs and 401 K plans. We should do more to help all working families save and accumulate wealth. That's the idea behind the Individual Development Accounts, the IDAs. I ask you to take that idea to a new level, with new Retirement Savings Accounts that enable every low- and moderate-income family in America to save for retirement, a first home, a medical emergency, or a college education. I propose to match their contributions, however small, dollar for dollar, every year they save."
Isn't that grand? Do you think that Bill and Hillary, Al and Tipper, Hastert and all of the members of the federal government are going to come up with these "matching" dollars out of their own pockets? Do you think that they're going to take money out of their own personal profits the way your employer does with Social Security's matching dollar-for-dollar? So, where do you think they're going to get these "matching" funds? Let's see, if we can get all 140 million working Americans to put up $100 each, we'd have about $14 billion to play with. If we can get them to do that several times a year, or half of them to do it more frequently, we'd have a fortune. Where would it go?
Just like Social Security's excess/surplus, it would all stay in the Treasury's general fund until it's spent on wars, international banking blunders, the New World Order, or some other pork-barrel project. It would all stay right there in the general fund until it's borrowed/stolen/needed by the new Ponzi and his Tammany Hall henchmen. Of course, every individual would be credited with the amount contributed in a new IDA Trust Fund called a "Retirement Savings Account," but it wouldn't be cash in that fund. It would be the same old bogus UOU nonmarketable bond deal we get for excess/surplus Social Security and other entitlement excesses/surpluses, now accounting for almost $2 trillion of the national debt ($1.989 trillion at the close of fiscal 1999)-$864 billion in Social Security alone.
When the government "borrows" your excess entitlement contributions, they put your future taxes up for security. Isn't that nice? Something for your children and grandchildren to pay off. The "matching" dollar-for-dollar deal would also be nothing more than these same bogus UOU bonds under the "Pay-it-again, Sam" plan. And contributing members probably would get interest on top of their pile and be able to make early withdrawals for a new home, education, or whatever, maybe even without penalty. So, where do the "matching" funds come from? The only difference between this new IDA rip-off and the Social Security/Medicare/gas tax/all entitlement rip-off is that, in this case, every working American would be paying the "matching" dollars for those foolish enough to subscribe to this new con. Again, government takes the contributions, spends them wherever it wants, and then simply places "matching" UOU bonds (nonmarketable Treasury securities) in an account (trust fund), where they gain annual interest until taxpayers buy them back. It's the same old rip-off and double taxation.
Meanwhile, members of the federal government, everyone from the Prez to interns, more than two million federal employees, have their own "Thrift Savings Plan" where, through Barclay Bank of Great Britain, they invest in Standard and Poor's 500 index of the New York Stock Exchange. They've been gaining a return of about 32 percent annually on this venture. But attempts to introduce anything similar to this for the general public have been shot down.
--ED HENRY, <http://www.poop.org/>