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First of all, I apologize for the vanity, but this is a subject that has been touched on inside the forum over the years briefly. Given the current political season and the focus on the illegals in our midst, I would like to bring this up again. We discuss the use of E-verify and other eligibility sites for employers to use, but we have a governmental enemy working against us: The Social Security Administration itself. Of course, the problem has gotten much worse during the current regime, and local SSA offices have been given their marching orders for years now....

Why are you here?" I asked. The whistleblowers looked at each other and smiled. "Because I love my country. And I just can't do this no more. It's not right," said one of the IRS workers. "That's why we're both here," said the other, echoing her colleague with long, deliberate pauses. "It's a crime, and it's…just…not…right." Together, they have decades of experience at the Internal Revenue Service, working on the front lines with frustrated, angry or confused taxpayers who contact the agency for help. Risking their jobs to come forward, the whistleblowers do not want to show their identity. But...

Social Security's financial health has deteriorated significantly over the past eight years, with multi-trillion-dollar funding shortfalls posing a threat to retirees and taxpayers alike. But if Social Security is to thrive in the 21st century, the next president needs to do more than simply adjust its tax and benefit rules. Instead, Social Security needs a new paradigm for how individuals and government programs contribute to retirement security. Social Security receives scant attention compared to many other policy issues, large and small. But Social Security is an important program, both in its impact on Americans' lives and in what it says...

See Mike Lee's Twitter page and his facebook post

From Mike Lee's Facebook: This is how it happens. Last night while you were sleeping the Senate voted to steal $150 billion dollars from the Social Security Trust Fund. I joined 34 of my colleagues in a vote to prevent this raid. I would like to thank Senator Rand Paul for leading the fight to protect to Social Security from the thieves in Washington, who seem to think that if they steal from the American people at night while they are sleeping that they will get away with it. I was proud to vote with Senator Paul on his point...

When Congress passed the Senior Citizens Freedom to Work Act in 2000, it introduced a new concept called “voluntary suspension” of benefits, allowing those who had already started Social Security benefits to stop their payments and earn delayed retirement credits. In the process, however, the new voluntary suspension rules unleashed several additional Social Security claiming strategies, including various “claim now, claim more later” tactics involving File-and-Suspend and Restricted Applications for spousal benefits. Those may be going away. Under this week’s two-year budget agreement between Congressional leaders and the White House, Congress will close these loopholes in the Social Security rules....

A budget agreement reached by congressional leaders and the White House would kill popular Social Security claiming strategies shortly after the measure becomes law, cutting off payments in midstream for beneficiaries, according to experts.

Another Government Ponzi Scheme Starts to Crack - Do You Depend on It?Government employees get to do a lot of things that would land an ordinary citizen in prison.For example, it’s legal for them to threaten and commit offensive, rather than defensive, violence. They can take property from others without their consent. They spy on anyone’s email and bank accounts whenever they please. They go into trillions of dollars in debt and then stick the unborn with the bill. They counterfeit the currency. They lie with misleading statistics and use accounting wizardry no business could get away. And this just...

I got this in my FB page and it is good enough to remind us ... again

More than 65 million seniors got their pockets picked last week, and the hue and cry could be heard across the country. The Social Security Administration announced Thursday that there would be no cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for 2016. Yes, America’s elderly, who paid into the system with each paycheck, are getting screwed. And that’s due to the way the SSA’s COLA calculation is done — it essentially comes directly from the notoriously inaccurate Consumer Price Index (CPI). Why not use the “Core CPI,” which strips out food and energy and is not subject to the volatile swings in commodities...

About 30% of the roughly 52 million people enrolled in Part B could see a 52% rise in those premiums if Congress and the Obama administration don’t find a way to freeze or reduce the increase. New beneficiaries, those with high incomes and Medicare recipients who don’t get Social Security would be hit with the increase. For them, the standard Part B premium would rise about $55 a month, or about $650 a year.

WASHINGTON — The 60 million people on Social Security will not receive any cost-of-living increase in their benefits in 2016, the government said on Thursday, but because of a quirk in federal law, nearly one-third of Medicare beneficiaries could see record increases in their premiums unless Congress intervenes. With millions of older Americans on fixed incomes facing that one-two punch, the Obama administration is urging Congress to moderate or stop the health insurance premium increases, which could raise the cost for some Medicare beneficiaries by about 50 percent — the largest increase, by far, in the history of Medicare. But...

WASHINGTON (AP) — There will be no benefit increase next year for millions of Social Security recipients, disabled veterans and federal retirees, the government said Thursday. It's just the third time in 40 years that payments will remain flat. All three times have come since 2010. And there's more bad news. The lack of a benefit increase means that many older people could face higher Medicare costs, an issue that has advocates lobbying Congress. The main reason for no increase next year is low gas prices. By law, the annual cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, is based on a government measure...

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said he and his rich pals should “voluntarily” forgo their Social Security benefits to bolster the health of the retiree entitlement system, declaring “I don’t need mine, by the way.” At a multi-candidate presidential forum in New Hampshire on Monday, Mr. Trump said that for the good of the country, rich taxpayers should sacrifice the benefits from the entitlement system into which they had paid throughout their professional lives. “I have friends that are worth hundreds of millions and billions of dollars and get Social Security. They don’t even know the check comes in,” said...

WASHINGTON (AP) — For just the third time in 40 years, millions of Social Security recipients, disabled veterans and federal retirees can expect no increase in benefits next year, unwelcome news for more than one-fifth of the nation's population. They can blame low gas prices. By law, the annual cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, is based on a government measure of inflation, which is being dragged down by lower prices at the pump. The government is scheduled to announce the COLA — or lack of one — on Thursday, when it releases the Consumer Price Index for September. Inflation has been...

The annual cost - of - living adjustment (COLA) to Social Security benefits will likely be zero in January 2016. The COLA will be announced on Oct. 15, when the last data required to compute it becomes available. But the data already suggest that prices have fallen over the past 12 months, removing the need for an adjustment. If prices have fallen but the COLA is zero, the purchasing power of Social Security benefits would increase. The Social Security Administration determines the COLA based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) compiled by the...

Exeter, New Hampshire (CNN)—Ohio Gov. John Kasich said Friday that a New Hampshire audience member would "get over" cuts to Social Security payments as a result of his reform plan -- and the left is already pouncing on the comment. The Republican presidential candidate was asked about entitlement reform during NH1's "Fiscal Fridays" series in Concord, New Hampshire, on Friday, and he said it was something that would have to get done. "We can't balance a budget without entitlement reform. What are we, kidding?" Kasich said when asked about his opponents who say they won't touch entitlements. Kasich said he...

Americans are funny about taxes: When we complain about them, we don’t moan that we are paying too much — we lament that others are paying too little. In a Pew Research Center poll last year, only 27 percent of Americans cited their own tax liabilities among their complaints about the tax code, while 64 percent complained that other taxpayers — the wicked 1 percenters, the dreaded corporations — were getting off too easy. If you’ve ever met anybody who believes that we can balance the budget by cutting foreign aid, that the Social Security “trust fund” is a real...

A high school teacher who has worked in Oregon and Manhattan is determined to pass on his history of the Great Depression. “By the end of Roosevelt’s first two terms in office, nonagricultural private-sector workers had the right to organize unions and the National Labor Relations Board was created to enforce that right,” Adam Sanchez writes in the Fall 2015 issue of Rethinking Schools. “The unemployed had access to a new, permanent system of unemployment insurance, and the elderly could rely on social security.” “Millions of people were put back to work through federal jobs programs.” Sanchez, who teaches at...

"It's very likely the COLA will be zero, given the way the numbers are now," said Polina Vlasenko, senior research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. The problem: The way the government measures inflation simply doesn't reflect what people on Social Security spend their money on. The elderly simply don't benefit as much from lower gas prices as the average American worker because they're no longer driving to and from work. The falling gas prices are due primarily to oil prices, which are near a six-year low. A surge in U.S. oil production has fed a massive glut...