DAMN SOCIAL SECURITY

boblonsberry.com ^ | 12/20/07 | Bob Lonsberry

[shortstop]

Damn Social Security and the thieves who thought it up.

That's my attitude.

As I make a list of reasons why I hate the government, Social Security has to be near the top. It is, for me, the most recognizable and intrusive tyranny in my life.

And that's saying a lot.

We sadly live in a day when the strangling grip of government chokes the life and liberty out of working Americans all across this country. We are little more than sharecroppers and slaves in a system of taxation and regulation which dictates everything in our lives – from what we can build on our property to how much water there is in our toilet. The lion's share of our labor and wealth is confiscated for bloated bureaucracies and covetous welfare parasites. We are burdened by a government that has long since stopped being what the Founders envisioned.

So when you're making a list of reasons to hate the government, you better have lots of time and lots of paper.

But today we're going to talk about Social Security.

And how Social Security has deprived me of my life's dream.

First, the dream. One evening, when I was 19, in a trailer in the Arizona desert near Winslow, I decided I wanted land. Country land. As I stood there talking with my host, he told me about the five acres upon which his trailer sat, and his plans for it.

And it fired my imagination. I thought of all the things you could do with a few acres. And for years I've thought about it. I've read and planned and daydreamed.

I want some country land. Where it rains and the trees grow and you can pasture cows and plant crops and stock your pond with fish. I want chickens and sheep and a woodlot.

I want it for the peace of it, for the hard calloused-hands work of it, for the fruitfulness of it and for the self-reliance of it. It's my heritage, and I'd like it to be my future.

But I am not a man of means. I'm a wage earner. I'm a middle-income guy with a lot of kids and all the money I make goes to supporting my family.

And the government. My family budget has always been pressed toward insolvency by the voracious, thieving hand of government. Year after year I have cut corners and shorted my children while money I've earned has been siphoned away by a government that takes it before I see it. I have less and less and the government takes more and more. All of society is entitled to my paycheck – except me.

And so at 48 I am no nearer my country land than I was at 19.

Which gets me back to Social Security.

I was going through some papers the other day and found that little mailing the Social Security Administration sends out periodically, the one that shows how much of your money they've taken from you, year by year. I looked at the numbers and added them up and the total struck me odd. It occurred to me, looking at the numbers, that I had essentially paid a mortgage over the near 35 years of my working life. A mortgage that, applied to land, would have long since given me my dream.

And my freedom. And a great deal more security and prosperity than Social Security will ever provide.

See, the idea of land is not just some country idyll. It's also a practical objective, a means to an independent end. While the government wants me to be dependent in my old age on a miserly monthly check, I would rather provide myself with the means of self-support.

With just a few acres of land, tillable and forested, I would with simple labor be able to provide myself with food and heat. I could raise and grow what I ate and cut and chop what I burned. I could become at least in part self-sufficient.

And that is a far-preferable retirement plan to a Social Security check. In the name of providing for my old age, the government has taken away my ability to provide for myself in my old age. Instead of investing my income as I see fit – in land or in anything else – it is stolen by the government and put into a Ponzi scheme that has no realistic likelihood of being solvent when it comes my turn to retire. To promise me security, the government must deprive me of liberty.

I have lost the ability to use my own money as I see fit. I have lost the ability to provide for my own retirement. I have lost the simplest right of a free man – the right to live by the sweat of my own brow, and not have it stolen away by a covetous and avaricious government in whose eyes I am little more than a beast of burden.

Country land would provide many of my needs until I grew too enfeebled to work it. Then I could sell it to get myself the care I need. In time I would die, but I would go to my grave having paid my own way and having lived as I chose.

But those are things the government now deprives me of.

I have clung to a dream, and one simple tax has destroyed it. My dream is going into some drunk's SSI check, or into the rat hole of the welfare/bureaucracy complex, the vast industry that lives off the life's blood of Americans who work.

I love my country. I would die for the Constitution. But I hate my government. I hate what generations of snakes in elective office have done to the greatest nation and the freest people ever to grace the earth.

We should be free to plan for our old age they way we want. To invest our money in land or a business or in stocks and bonds. We should be free from ridiculous taxes that don't deliver what they promise. We should be free from the socialist dreams of long-dead New Dealers.

But we are not free – we are Americans.

And damn the men who have made us this way.

[Cementjungle]

I’m not trusting the government as far as I can throw it when it comes to 401Ks or things like ROTH IRAs. They’ll steal from it, or all of it, mark my words...

One word... diversify.

[dinodino]

Perhaps you should buy a calculator and learn to use it. Once you’ve learned to use it, compare the yields of SS versus self-managed investments, and get back to us. If after this you still support Social Security, you have a mental illness.

[Comus]

I hope you are bullshitting, if not, you are an idiot.

[Onelifetogive]

Apparently, everybody pays Social Security but nobody knows exactly how much comes out of their check. The social security rate is 6.2%, and the employer matches that. Do you REALLY think your employer is going to GIVE you his portion? Be glad he has to pay it to your account.

Do you think my employer is paying out one penny more for me than he has to? My employer is paying the absolute minimum "Total Cost of Employment" that he can. The 6.2% match is not a free gift over and above that. It, therefore, must be taken from my pay.

[Wurlitzer]

"Your employer matched your social security also."

That is exactly what the government and all the socialists want you to believe. The TRUTH is you pay for it. When a business hires a person, ALL monies are considered as the cost of that person's employment. It makes NO difference to the company if those dollars are in the form of a pay check, Federal/State taxes, SSI, Health care, Disability Ins., etc., etc..

Your entire pay check and all the "benefits" are what you earn and yes that 1/2 of the SS payment that you think the employer pays is in fact YOUR MONEY!

[mo]

Are you sure you’re at the right place?!!!!Its called FREE republic for a reason...SHEESH!!!

[Lokibob]

I would bet that unless the government mandated a 6.2% pay raise, if they decided to drop the employer match, you would not see one red cent. Hell, I wouldn’t pay it unless I had to.

Following your logic, if they drop corporate income tax, all the prices would drop 25%, right? In your dreams. The companies would put it right back into their bottom line.

Social Security needs to be reformed, I agree. However people will NOT save for retirement. I would like to see a phasing down of Social Security coupled with an expansion of a mandatory 401(K) like program with NO provision for withdrawal until retirement age. This would allow the worker to direct where his money is invested.

.....Bob

[napscoordinator]

Are you sure you’re at the right place?!!!!Its called FREE republic for a reason...SHEESH!!!

I don’t believe that every person here agrees with every topic that we discuss. Are you a robot? I doubt it. I am sure that their are things you believe that I would question so what is your problem. So I don’t feel that SS should stop. So what. Many worse things than that.

[napscoordinator]

Perhaps you should buy a calculator and learn to use it. Once you’ve learned to use it, compare the yields of SS versus self-managed investments, and get back to us. If after this you still support Social Security, you have a mental illness.

Your the one with mental illness. I am not giving Social Security for myself. I am giving it for my Great Grandmother, four Grandparents and eventually my parents. What don’t you understand about that????

[mike_9958]

I believe that “hating the government” was the general consensus of our forefathers and seems to be a common thread throughout American history.

But government was created to protect the weak - stating that all men are created equal when in fact they are not. So if your on the upper half of the bell curve chances are you hate the government.

gotta love logic

[RetiredArmy]

Good article. I agree with a lot of what he said. He speaks of the imperial federal government as I do. Every time the imperial federal congress makes another law, we lose another freedom. They keep making up laws just to take our freedoms away. Once this nation was a country of many freedoms and few stinking laws. The only laws that were needed for years and years were fine. Then one day, some guy decided that Congress could control us by taking away all those hard fought for freedoms and make us all surfs to the imperial federal government. I served 20 years in defense of the REPUBLIC and AMERICA. I did not serve the federal government. Even in my military time, I was angry at the things the federal government did, to take away even the freedoms from we military folks. They made promises to us for our service. Then after our service was done and we have grown old, they decided they could not pay for our promises and the socialism needed to buy votes. So, they took away the promises to us, cut others to the bone. Way back when I was around 15 years in the military, one guy and me were talking about our retirements. I told him the way they were taking things away, that some day we would be left with only the retirement check and none of the other things. Well, that has come basically true. All the other things that were part of the retirement package have been taken away and if we want them, we pay through the nose for them. So, we are few, thus easy targets to cut. The “sit on their lazy asses with hands held out for free stuff” crowd are many, thus out number us, thus they take from us and give to them. I hate the federal government. They lied to the very people who put their lives on the line every day, just to let them have the freedom to rule. I would gladly serve my country again. But, I will never serve the federal government. I have no faith in the federal government nor any of the people in it. They are simply liars, cheats, thieves, thugs, and criminals. It has got to the point that I am sick to even vote for one of them.

[PLMerite]

“... but do you know ANYONE who has gotten back ALL of what they put in?”

I think Social Security recipients typically collect all the money they put in after only a few years, but I haven’t done the math.

[Axenolith]

:-)

[error99]

I absolutely agree with you.

[Maigrey]

My dad passed away in September, and was on SSD for 12 months. He might have gotten back 50% of what he paid in. Now my aunt and granmother... they are the real winners.

And I've known since I was 18 that I wouldn't get a dime. (15 years so far) So I've been planning accordingly.

I wonder if I could write it off on my taxes? Nah. Dang money grubbers.....

[JUMPIN JEHOSPOHAT]

A friend was forced to take SS in 1955 he calculated all the money he’d pay into it as opposed to what he’d make with the flat retirement savings he already had. Now it turns out he would have over five times what he will ever live to get from Social Security!

[kcar]

screw the old people and the socialist horse they rode in on.

In a Ponzi scheme such as the SSI the first users are the real beneficiaries. That would have been those retiring in the late 1930's and 1940's, and possibly 1950's, who would have been paid more than they paid in. All of those people have probably passed on.

Re: this thread the writer speaks my own strong sentiments very precisely. We are sheeple after all, contained in a box to be milked like batteries. When the train wreck happens and revolution comes maybe the bureaucrats and politicians who have a pension because they opted out of SS will then understand the acute ire of the masses.

[Lijahsbubbe]

Fantastic article. Bump.

[shortstop]

"Figure 5% on whatever you paid in the first year only, add that to the second year and multiply 5% and add to the third year etc."

That's exactly what I did. I did a present value study. This ain't my rookie season.

[jwh_Denver]

Things are going alright prospector. Can’t believe it’s Christmas already. The passage of time is exponentially proportional to one’s age. Vapors of smoke. God wasn’t kidding.

Merry Christmas to you and yours. Find the mother lode yet?