THE BIG LIE: SOCIAL SECURITY "GOING BROKE"
YOU PAY--THEY STEAL--YOU PAY AGAIN
YOU PAY extra taxes to Social Security, Medicare, airports and airlines, for gasoline and many other general or user-defined items--over and above what is required for each of these entities to meet their commitments for the fiscal year.
THEY STEAL this money and spend it to finance wars, world banking, and other pork barrel schemes they could not otherwise afford.
YOU PAY AGAIN in the most preposterous con game ever perpetrated upon citizens. Your government replaces this stolen cash with promissory notes that only you, the public, can redeem--who paid this tax in the first place. This is double taxation plain and simple.
How could anyone think that an organization with an annual net profit of $55,000,000,000 is in trouble, especially when, the very next year, the same organization's net profit jumps to $67 billion? That's more than the combined profits of all of the blue-chip companies on the New York Stock Exchange taken together in one lump. Furthermore, this very same organization operated on less than 1 percent of its budget and does so while promptly meeting the demands of over 40 million customers, and maintaining offices in every major city. No other organization in the country operates with this sort of efficiency.
Now suppose that you are the president of this company and you've been stealing the profits for years to spend on other ventures and pipe dreams, most of which return no profit at all. Suppose further that the pressures and diminishing returns from these other ventures require even more profit from the successful company. You now need to squeeze everything you can out of this parent organization that you inherited. You need to increase the cost to customers while cutting back on products delivered. How are you going to do this?
In January 1998, in his State-of-the-Union address, President William Jefferson Clinton told the American people that Social Security was "in trouble" and that we must "fix the roof while the sun is shining." We must spend the next year coming up with solutions to Social Security's problems. Nobody doubted him.
The basis for this "trouble" was that "76 million baby boomers" were looming on the horizon and about to bankrupt Social Security when they start to retire. No one questioned the fact that this figure was more than half--more than 50 percent of the workforce at the time, 134 million reported by the Labor Department.
The unstated assumption here is that 10 million lusty servicemen returned from Europe, the Pacific, and other stations of World War II, and immediately began fathering an average of 7.6 children between 1945 and 1960. Some even stretch this period to 1965.
The people, the press, and the media ate it up. Like Chicken Little, they all started running about shouting warnings to one another. For months, the press published stories about baby boomers, often getting the numbers mixed up, but generally reporting that somewhere between 70 and 80 million baby boomers were coming. Consumer product companies began to ask, "What are we doing to target the boomers?"
Almost entirely, the more recent graduates of America's public education system began to doubt that Social Security "would be there for them," believing that Social Security would go broke long before they become eligible for benefits and that all of the FICA payments they are now making are down the drain. Politicians like Newt Gingrich took up their cause under the usual "save our children" banner. No one bothered to check the U.S. Census data, the only source of figures on U.S. population and its rate of increase. If they had, they would have found that another lie had been perpetrated and spread across the nation; and that there are not more than 5 to 7 million true baby boomers--the true number of births above normal between 1945 and 1965, a number that the Social Security Administration could handle with its hands tied behind its back, making adjustments as they have many times in the past.
Nowadays, one year and a half later, you seldom hear numbers quoted about the seventy something million baby boomers, but the idea of a boomer generation is firmly implanted, and everyone still believes an organization with profits of $67 billion this fiscal year alone is "in trouble."
And what use is being made of this phony surplus? Well, $6 billion was already taken from the lock box to bail out the International Monetary Fund (IMF)--independent bankers who screwed up on loans to unreliable third-world nations. Another $7 to $13 billion is estimated to get us through the war in Kosovo. Senator Fritz Hollings (D-SC) says: "We're paying for the war in Kosovo with Social Security money."
Isn't there something perverse about conducting a war with our stolen retirement funds?
Several plans to reform Social Security have evolved. All of these plans recommend precisely what the thieves want--reduce benefits, increase FICA taxes, and/or change the age for benefits; i.e., increase cost to the people and cut back on the product. None of them address the real problem--stealing the profits and not investing them wisely.
And it's not just Social Security's excess profits that are being stolen, it's Medicare's, the Highway Trust Fund's, profits belonging to the Airport and Airways Trust Fund, and many, many other trust funds being raided every year. As constituted, the federal government has no business whatsoever setting up and managing trust funds. While some of the key players are deserting like rats from a sinking ship, and others are confessing to their crime while proposing inadequate "lock-boxes" to protect at least the large Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds, the main plan is still fully intact.
I don't believe the politicians and bureaucrats will ever approach the real problem. To do so would expose all of the slush funds that they've established for their own retirement, hospitalization, insurance, and so forth. The Civil Service Trust Fund alone holds $450 billion. There are only about 2 million federal employees, including post office workers. So compare this with $739 billion in the Social Security Trust Fund, representing 139 million current workers, plus 40 million of the disabled and retired. Civil Service has 1/90th of the people and more than half as much money in a trust fund. A little inequity wouldn't you think?
They cannot possibly "save" Social Security and Medicare. Not when they refuse to admit the problem. Not when the federal government hides and ignores the bald-faced fact that they have been stealing Social Security's money by the barrel load since 1983 and have no intention of stopping. Not when they have no way at all to pay it back. It's absolutely insane.
Since Alan Greenspan showed the federal government how to create a huge slush fund under the name "trust," a very efficient governmental department that has never been "in trouble" has been collecting far more yearly income than it needs in order to pay all of the retired and disabled beneficiaries under its care. You pay this "excess" out of the 12.4 to 15 percent FICA taxes you contribute to Social Security, thinking all the time that you're setting something aside for a rainy day or your golden years. Wrong.
Your representatives in Congress, the federal government, take every cent of this excess money and spend it on pork barrel projects. They literally steal it, although they usually refer to it as "borrowing" or "off budget revenue," sometimes even calling it an "investment" they make in your name.
It's exactly the same as thieves breaking into your home, holding every working member of your family at gunpoint and demanding money, while telling you that they simply need some "off budget" cash because they don't have enough. They take your money and go out to blow it on good times. You can witness these "good times" all around you. Isn't the stock market and the economy each doing just great?
To ease their conscience, try to trick you, and possibly to keep you from calling the police, these thieves leave behind promissory notes that are supposed to account for the sum stolen. They call these "IOUs" which is yet another misnomer. And they tell you that they are putting these IOUs in a trust fund for you and your children. These promissory Treasury bonds have about as much value as the address you might give a panhandler so he can mail back the money you gave him. It's worse, because these panhandlers are going to later present you with "these notes" and demand that you pay them again, a second time, with interest.
The last thing that this gang of thieves wants to face is a day of reckoning when you might drag them before some higher power and demand to draw on this trust fund or have your cash returned. To keep this from happening, these pirates will invent all sorts of fairy tales. A popular one is that "76 million" other people are just around the corner expecting and waiting for them to come to their rescue.
--Ed Henry, People's Open Opposition Party <www.poop.org> is a veteran research analyst, a pioneer of qualitative market research in Chicago, founder of a Chicago firm "Applied Market Research."