Posted on 12/20/2007 10:49:56 AM PST by 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.
ROFL!
Such a lawsuit has already been filed 48 years ago now, and the US Supreme Court ruled that Social Security is a tax, not an annuity, pension, or savings account, and the terms of payments can be changed at will by Congress, and you have no contractual or other right to benefits. See Fleming v. Nestor, 363 US 603 [1960].
Americans don't even let Indonesians starve in the streets, what makes you think we'd let Americans starve in the streets if not for the Velvet Fist of the Almighty State?
I suppose if politicians are truly committed to helping the working poor, eliminate Socialist Security. That will never happen though...
DU would concur heartily.
You can’t look at Social Security as a retirement investment. Your money went to pay someone else’s social security check. Any extra went into the governments general revenue and was spent. There is nothing to compound/grow.
Phase it out. Start now.
Social security as a privately funded personal investment fund would be fine and a good idea. What it is now is trash and a ponzi scheme that is dumping a mount of debt on my generation (I’m 26) that can probably never be repaid. Thanks a lot.
I, too, hate Social “Security”! But this world is not my home. I’m justa passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue. The angels beckon me from Heaven’s open door
....and I can’t feel at home in this world any more! (sounds like an old spiritual?) I feel sad for those who will only have earth....and Social Insecurity...for a home.
WTF are you talking about. If he started off making 50k a year, putting in 6% (with employee matching) and getting just a 6% rate of return, after 35 years he’d have $712,000, not $105,000. Even just his portion (excluding company match) would be $356k. At a rate of 10%, he’d have nearly 1.9 million (or 950k on his own).
LOL are you serious? I get about a 12% average rate of return on 401k in the last 5 years vs 2.5% for SS and if I die early it’s passed on to whomever I want instead of lost to the government. How is that “not much better than ss”?
And who owns the Government? Voters - namely you, me, etc. And we send the same people we complain about back to D.C. time and time and time again. We get what we deserve.
Another benefit to investment is that your savings are put into the world's most efficient creator of wealth--the free market. Social security payments are put into the world's most efficient creator of something else, the US Government.
Upthread, it was said that the government takes in $100-200 billion more in Social Security receipts than it spends on Social Security entitlements. Imagine a system of federally-managed private retirement accounts (like the TSP system for federal employees) set up for younger workers so they could recoup the SS taxes that aren't paying entitlements today. That money would be go right back into the stock market. We'd have a lot more investment in American companies today, and universal retirement savings for tomorrow.
Do you and your wife have a lot of kids? Just curious!
I never voted for any socialists and I didn’t ride in on a horse, thanks.
Without enough financial smarts to really discuss this, I did want to say that I have been retired several years and get a $752.00 SS check each month. It’s nearly all I have, after working 35 years - a lot of them years when women didn’t make as much money as men did - and I feel like it is owed to me because I paid it in, as I think most would have to agree. Like many women raising their kids alone while working full time (four legal kids born while married, in the long-ago days when it was still popular/acceptable to have kids!), I really didn’t have anything extra for investing or saving. I made sure I would own my final home with a mortgage so small I could handle it on SS - so I did that right. I didn’t bite on the drug coverage scam; can’t afford it and don’t want it. I have told all my kids - the oldest is 50 - not to count on SS being there for them, to make what arrangements they can NOW. So don’t talk about pulling the rug out from under me because YOU are mad. And yes, this is why the broke system isn’t going to be fixed quickly, easily, or very well. But when my generation dies off, have at it.
Millions of Americans have had this tax taken from their earnings. Many also have saved whatever they could on their own. Had they been allowed the right to privately invest what the SS tax took from them for 20, 30, 40 or so years, some could have been financially independent of the gov't program.
The only way to end Social Security is to phase it out over several decades. Yet we will still be left the problem of older folks, etc., who don't have enough money to survive.
With these the federal government has conferred upon itself the mechanisms to intrude into all of your affairs, and claim all wealth you generate.
My grandparents’ generation, born at the very end of the 19th Century, was the last generation that lived as free Americans. They were actual citizens. And they lived part of their lives without these monstrous, unconstitutional, abominations of legislation.
My parents generation, the WWII generation, was the last generation who thought they were free. They voluntarily turned in their citizenship to become subjects. All of their shackles were forged and locked around them in open sight. And they cheered.
My generation, the Baby Boomers, was too busy throwing a temper tantrum to stop this slavery while there was still a chance. And now the boomers are beginning to notice the shackles they are wearing. But too many still whine about bogus “causes” (such as Global Warming) instead of solving real problems.
And the generations following the boomers? Well, welcome to the plantation fellow slave. Hope you can spell "crash and burn"!
We raised 5 kids,,all grown, and working now.
You are absolutely right. It would be a huge boon for the economy.
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