Senator Grassley - Please Resign

Tom Painter

[Wuli]

Senator Grassley:

Please resign. Please ask your party to ask your state to hold a special election for your immediate replacement.

The problem with Social Security is not a fictitious need to look like your party is being nice to Democrats. The problem with Social Security is not the need for another temporary fix, like congress has used at some point in every decade of Social Security's existence - to raise the Social Security taxes on the American people (look at the record).

The problem with Social Security is over six decades of spineless people in Washington, D.C. that don't have the honesty or guts to tell the American people the truth - "The Contract Is Broken" ©TomPainter. A fictitious trust fund that has never contained anything other than an accounting of the sums that the American people, operating through their U.S. Treasury, owe to themselves as debt to themselves for Social Security, is not a trust fund. It is a financial and political pyramid scheme.

If any corporation dared attempt to tell their employees that their pension fund assets were nothing more than debt that the company owed itself for money it had already spent, you'd been one of the first to rise up in the Senate chamber and demand an investigation. Yet, for Social Security, you simply want to keep the myth going. You should be investigated.

The problem with Social Security is that as soon as people in congress like you expect Social Security to start using its fictitious assets, you want to be sure Americans are taxed enough to avoid you having to admit the reality of the "trust fund". That reality is that from the first moment Social Security walks over to the Treasury with IOUs it needs to redeem to pay benefits - sometime between 2013 and 2018 - the Treasury will not have any money to give to Social Security for those IOUs, unless taxes are raised. You want a "fix" that avoids the lie about the non-existent savings in the non-existent trust fund.

Private accounts for the younger generations are needed, essential and mandatory to correct the philosophical error that Social Security perpetuates. Private accounts for younger generations are needed so that they will have a personal stake in real assets that belong to them; assets that are not available for anyone's political objectives. Private accounts are needed to move the retirement system, gradually over time, to one based on true savings and assets, and not the political slush fund that Social Security is now.

Current recipients and workers who have been in the system most of their working lives deserve some form of protection of some level of current expected benefits. But, whatever those protections need to be, they cannot detract for the greater need for a better system for the future.

Any retirement system that has only been fixed by increasing taxes on the American people is a system that is flawed at its heart. The so-called surplus in the "trust fund" has never paid a single benefit, and never can pay a single benefit to anyone. How can it, it is debt we owe ourselves and to use it, we must pay for it all over again.

Any "trust fund" surplus at any time in the history of Social Security has never been anything more than a political slush fund, whereby congress avoids having to ask the people if it can increase their debt or their taxes. Congress spends any excess raised by FICA taxes, adds that expense to debt we owe ourselves and refers to the accounting of that debt as "assets". It is a joke.

Since you are one who refuses to step forward and declare the Social Security emperor naked, as any child of the accounting profession can see, then please resign, so that this congress and your party can seek a person who has the spine to take on the difficult issues of the day. It is not important whether or not that task pleases the Democrats. Let your party have someone who is not afraid to speak the truth to your constituents, and your peers in Congress.

©Tom Painter

[nonliberal]

In general, you are right. He was good in the Reagan era. In the last 6-8 years he has really wandered off the reservation.

[conservonator]

He was good in the Reagan era. In the last 6-8 years he has really wandered off the reservation.

He has his moments. Like all career politicians, they begin to rot around the edges. Find a better candidate and I'll support him, until then, asking for his resignation is asinine.

[nonliberal]

How about Salier?

[conservonator]

How about Salier?

I like him a lot, I'd have no problem supporting him.