Excellent article.
The Congcritters are more worried about Schiavo and Steroids than Illegal Immigration, SS, IRS and Taxes, etc, etc.
Pretty damn pathetic.
The president, and/or his supporters, needs to start making the point EVERY day that members of Congress do NOT participate in Soc Sec..Let the American people start to connect the dots for themselves..IOW, if SS is so freaking wonderful, why does Congress put their retirement money somewhere else.. BTW, wasn't one of the points in the Contract with America that Congress would never exempt itself from the laws it passed?..hmmm..
AARP is another source of misinformation. Their ads are ridiculous and make me wonder whether the powers that be in that organization are themselves suffering from senile dementia.
The SocSecurity message should be simple:
- on face value, the government "prints money" - but what it actually prints is dollars - and dollars - or anything else - are useful as money only if they are scarce. At the end of the 1970s we got a whiff of what happens when dollars become plentiful - they become less valuable.
- so the government gets its money from taxes. Taxes - even taxes "targeted on 'the rich'," - aren't a free lunch for society. Because as the experience of the end of the 1970s showed, high taxes can "price themselves out of the market" - suppressing the economy and throttling government revenue in the process.
- so while any individual can invest by lending money to the government, society as a whole cannot do so on a massive scale. No individual can invest by lending money to himself - and the government can't invest by lending to itself. Yet that is precisely what the bonds - the government obligations - in the "Social Security Trust Fund" purport to represent.
- The "Social Security Trust Fund" is not an investment vehicle but a bluff; the numbers entered into it could be raised or lowered at will by the government, and that would have no economic effect whatsoever. The Social Security FICA tax, a.k.a. "the payroll tax," is simply a tax. Most of it goes to fund present retiree's Social Security, and the government spends the rest and still has a current-accounts deficit.
- It is never too soon to stop doing something stupid, and allowing the government to make sham "investments" running into the trillions of dollars is downright silly. The only way to stop doing that is either to repeal the FICA tax or to divert its revenue into private (yes, "risky") accounts. You can say all you want about the risk of private investment, but at least there is opportunity there. The "safe" government bond will not help our grandchildren fund our children's Social Security at all. The SSTF is a bluff and nothing more.