AARP’s TRUE Agenda: AARP distorts the public-opinion data on Social Security.

AARP released a poll last month purportedly showing that the public agrees with it on a personal-account option for Social Security — opposing the idea by 48 percent to 43 percent. That poll seemed odd, since it was way out of line with polls going back over ten years now consistently showing large majorities supporting personal accounts.

So USA Next, the rapidly growing organization for future-looking, 21st-century seniors, asked nationally renowned pollster John McLaughlin to look into the AARP poll. What he found might remind you a little of what bloggers found when they looked into the supposed documents behind Dan Rather's phony CBS story about President Bush's National Guard service...

>>Finally, the public should recognize from the analysis of these polls that AARP is a liberal lobbying group, not an honest representative of seniors.<<

True words and we need to something soon because..
These are the Facts

* Excess Social Security contributions, coming from equal amounts paid by employee and employer taxes, currently provide more money than is currently spent on Social Security benefits.

* Excess Social Security contributions will accumulate until about 2012 at which time expenditures will exceed contributions.

* The Social Security Trust Fund will accumulate about 2.6 Trillion Dollars worth of excess Social Security contributions.

* Increasing numbers of retirees will cause higher Social Security expenditures after 2012 that will exhaust the 2.9 Trillion Dollars in the Trust Fund around 2029.

* The excess Social Security contributions said to be in the Trust Fund have already been placed in the General Fund and have been spent.

* The more than 100 Billion Dollars in annual excess Social Security contributions have been used to reduce the Federal deficit or produce a "surplus." (The deficit or surplus is basically the amount of money deposited in the general fund minus the amount of money spent.)

* The Federal government places nonnegotiable government bonds in the Trust Fund.

* Government bonds are essentially IOUs that the Federal Government will attempt to honor through its taxing power, borrowing ability, and money printing authority.

I hope it doesn't come as a surprise to people to learn that surveys, polls, and studies can be easily manipulated by unscrupulous people -- exacerbated by even greater distortions by the media, and subsequent reiterations.
They pull out the studies to get us to override our commonsense. It's gotten so bad that I think we can officially pronounce the mainstream stream media counterproductive at this point. That is, one is likely to be worse off consuming their input than not.

It's like the old debate over the Idiot Box -- whether one was more intelligent by watching television all day or less. We've gotten to the point at which receiving the information from sources like AARP makes us more disabled than empowered -- and that should be the criterion upon which we consume information. Does such information (sources) empower one or does it disable (victimize) one?

That's the reason for consuming information in the first place -- and not increasing one's sense of powerlessness, hopelessness, despair and depression. It should be increasingly clearer to wise and discriminating consumers of information that there is this dichotomy of information that liberates human intelligence and those whose sole purpose is to exploit, deceive, manipulate -- and they teach it many of the formerly esteemed institutions of higher learning. But it begins at the lowest level too.

That is the reason that I had my name taken off the AARP mailing list when I turned 50. I finally had to visit their main office in Washington to get it through to them that I was serious. I haven't received any mail from them in the 7 years since I did that. (I worked only a couple of blocks from their building at that time, so a personal visit was easy to do.)

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