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02/11/12
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May 10, 2005 It all started around noon on June 19, 2001 , when the somewhat reticent Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill delivered a luncheon speech to the Coalition for Financial Security in the Sky Room of the World Trade Center . In that speech, the new Secretary said that there “were no positive assets in the Social Security trust fund” and that he didn’t have any money buried in his backyard. Please note the similarity between that and what President Bush is saying today when he waves the Parkersburg back-up paper “assets” in the air and calls them “worthless” or when he says that there is no bank where the government put your payroll tax money to save it for your retirement. By Sunday, June 25, 2001 , O’Neill was on This Week with Sam Donaldson asking him to say the same thing in one of those two or three minute blurbs and before Sam turned to the latest murder of the moment. The rest of the “news” world picked up on this subject and blasted it all over the place. There wasn’t much else going on that summer, the Bush administration was relatively new, and G.W. had already put the fox back in the chicken coop by appointing ex-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to co-chair a commission to study ways of implementing his vague private accounts plan. The public already believed that “76 million baby-boomers” were looming on the horizon ready to wreck the supplemental retirement system (this was before Greenspeak changed the number to “77” million) and most youngsters believed that before retiring they had a better chance of meeting aliens from a spaceship than receiving their retirement money. The phony “lock-box” debates and government shut-downs were a thing of the past. People like Neil Cavuto of CNN were even joking about the trust fund. What good is it if there’s nothing of value in it? All of this is in the record. We are once more at that same point today, four years later. We are not only no further ahead, but we are rehashing some of the oldest points about Social Security. Not much progress at all. In the summer of 2001, we went further than this. Countless economists and authorities were trotted before the cameras – and they all said the same thing. They all said that if the Social Security Administration ever found it necessary to draw upon its trust fund, if payroll tax receipts were ever less than outflow, the poor dears in Washington would be faced with the unpleasant task of either (1) raising taxes (2) borrowing money on the “bond market” (3) cutting benefits or stealing from Peter’s budget allocations in order to pay Paul – or any combination of one, two, and three. And number three is really a case of money management, manipulation, and fraud – the same thing that got us into this mess. In other words, the American taxpayers will foot the bill. The federal government has no income other than what it gets from taxpayers and cannot possibly pay-off the enormous debt or “unfunded liabilities” they’ve accumulated through this fraud – not without additional taxpayer money. Not without your giving them even more money to cover their misdeeds. What’s more, the three options above are the normal revenue raising and money management options of the federal government at any time, whether there are any of these so-called trust funds or not. Ipso facto, these trust funds are truly “meaningless.” So much for where we were in 2001 and seem to have flushed from our collective consciousness and memories. It gets worse, much worse. And the truth will never come out as long as we keep burying our heads in the sand. Let’s look at what we should be considering – the things we’ve already got enough clues and factual information to put together, to connect the dots, about the greatest financial scam that’s ever been pulled by a government against its own citizens. First of all, the Social Security trust fund is not “meaningless” to the government. Currently standing at $1.7 trillion (and growing), this bogus trust can and will be used to double tax us. American taxpayers will pay again the same taxes that were paid in surplus before and interest has been added merely to maintain the fiction that the thieves “borrowed” the money instead of stealing it. And this compounding interest has been added at no expense to the pirates. They simply dump more markers in the account. Second, Social Security is not the only program caught in this trap. The entire “Intragovernmental Holdings” (IH) side of the national debt is composed of exactly the same sort of bogus holdings in bogus accounts. Currently standing at $3.2 trillion or roughly 42 percent of our $7.7 trillion national debt – this entire category is just as phony. If anyone wants examples of what will happen to Social Security someday, all they need do is look at what is already happening to accounts like the Unemployment trust fund which once stood at $92 billion in “unfunded liabilities” and today stands at a mere $39 billion. People got their unemployment checks didn’t they? Where did the $53 billion come from? Another account, second only to Social Security, is the government’s own Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) trust fund. This account has been in the “red” every month this year, 2005, and was in the red eleven of the twelve months of fiscal 2004. None of the beneficiaries have missed their elaborate retirement checks, so it’s being “funded” from somewhere. And you don’t hear anyone arguing about raising or not raising contributions, cutting benefits, increasing the age of federal employee retirement, or any of the other things you hear about Social Security. How come? The FERS account currently stands at $647.5 billion, just over a third of Social Security’s indebtedness while supporting much fewer beneficiaries than Social Security. For that matter, you don’t hear any politicians mentioning Medicare’s $296 billion trust fund. How come? They’re complaining that Medicare is in “more trouble” than Social Security. Where are the stories about how long these trust holdings will sustain Medicare? Waiting in the wings are other entitlements like Military Retirement, Veteran’s Insurance, the Highway trust fund from gas taxes, and several others caught in the same scam as Social Security. The list goes on and on. Things have not been good since 9/11, Bush went off on preemptive invasions, and the economy started to tank. Periodic “withdrawals” from these bogus accounts are already common. We’ve even got “withdrawals” coming out of the Federal Disability Insurance trust fund that, since 1957, has been part of Social Security. Some of this may be due to the preponderance of lawyers claiming to be disability advocates and some of it may even be workers who haven’t given up on finding a job or holding on to theirs, but may be adopting the soldier’s equivalent of shooting themselves in the foot. And it’s all happening before the fictitious “baby boomer” onslaught. Who’s footing the bill here and how can they continue to talk about not having to turn to the Social Security trust fund until 2012 or some other distant date somewhere in the Matrix? Everyone, politicians and commentators alike, talk about how Social Security is currently generating “more money than it needs” but no one, absolutely no one, is daring to mention “how much” extra/surplus money is being generated and stolen. If he had the guts, George W. Bush could use these tremendous amounts to sell his personal investment accounts idea. Imagine G.W. dropping his echo chambers and going before the general public to say something like; Look how much we could have been diverting into personal accounts or risk investment – $71 billion last year – $82 billion the year before that – $89 billion in 2002 – $99 billion my first year in office – $94 billion in Clinton’s last year – and more before that all the way back to 1983. Wouldn’t you rather have taken a chance investing these continuing surpluses in your own country, industries, real estate, and so forth, instead of just giving extra cash to a corrupt government to waste? And it’s not too late to do something about it. If we start now, tomorrow or the next day, take corrective action, the currently retired and disabled will still get their checks just as they always have and maybe the companies that left the country will come back, there will be more jobs, and everyone will have even more to invest. Of course it’s a risk, but that’s exactly the sort of thing this country was built upon, it’s what capitalism is all about. If you don’t think this would sell in a heartbeat, you’re crazy, a fool, and deserve to be duped, deceived and swindled. But it will never happen, not from the Bandits themselves. Instead, when they have pangs of guilt they’ll play around with things like “lock-boxes” when real trust funds are by their very nature already such. And the democrats, who are just as guilty as the other cult, will adopt the Nancy Reagan strategy of “just say no” and don’t even approach the subject. Hey, at least George is waving paper in the air. That’s more than you or the media are doing. (Ironically, just after finishing this article I went downstairs to feed my Dane puppy breakfast and found the wife had left the TV on. NBC’s Katie Curric, our $14 million a year soap opera hostess, was interviewing a guest and still trying to explain what it’s like to be comatose.)
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$3.2 Billion A Day - $2.25 Million A Minute Go George Go - Keep Talking About Social Security Pipedreams Of Social Security Reform Open Letter To President Bush & Congress Parkersburg Papers At The Bureau Of Public Debt The Job Market Reflected In March Payroll Taxes Changing Direction On Social Security Reform Cacophony - Don't Feed The Animals Your Money - Gone, But Not Forgotten Complete Archives for Ed Henry | ||||||||||||||
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