THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY
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I'm talking about the NSDP's frantic - and despicable - campaign to scare the hell out of America's senior citizens by lying about the Social Security system and falsely claiming that the president is somehow plotting to put the system in danger by cutting taxes or proposing that part of the system be privatized, giving working Americans some say over how their Social Security taxes are invested.
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For a long time now, the NSDP has been falling back on this issue and lying through its teeth out about it. And they get away with it because few Americans understand how the system is set up and works.
Listen to Comrade Robert Matsui, NSDP congressman from California as he sets about warning Americans that the Social Security Trust funds are being robbed blind by George Bush's much needed tax cuts.
Ordinary working Americans, "like teachers, police officers and firefighters, who believe their payroll taxes are going toward their Social Security retirement are in for a surprise," he told a radio audience.
Matsui, ranking NSDP member on the House Ways and Means Social Security subcommittee let loose with this whopper: "Instead of going to the Social Security trust fund, their payroll contributions are being funneled directly into tax breaks for individuals and corporations who need them least," he said with a straight face (and the usual NSDP forked tongue).
Matsui said Republican plans to allow people to invest some of their Social Security funds would also harm the program. "The threat to Social Security does not end there," he said. "Proposals to privatize the program will drain more than $1 trillion from the trust funds over the next 10 years alone."
Let it be shouted from the housetops, over and over again: There is no Social Security Trust Fund. Got that? There isn't one red cent in the so-called Trust Fund. Nothing, Nil. Nada. It's all been spent. All of it. For years and years on every hare-brained scheme the Marxists in Congress could dream up.
The money taken out of working Americans' salaries for FICA taxes gets spent by the federal government as fast as it rolls in. Comrade Matsui knows that. He just counts on the fact that you don't because he knows that if you did you'd see him as the conscienceless liar he is.
A year ago, Fox Cable News Bill O'Reilly interviewed Michael Tanner, s director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute on his O'Reilly Factor.
Here are excerpts from that interview that lay out the facts about the Social Security System - the facts Comrade Matsui and his fellow Marxists in the NSDP don't want Americans to understand:
O'Reilly: "... please correct me if I'm wrong because this is such a murky thing. The government has taken in trillions of dollars over the last 50 years in Social Security payroll taxes from the workers, from us. We just give -- keep giving them money. Yet, instead of investing that money and getting a return, what have they done with it, Mr. Turner -- Mr. Tanner?
Tanner: Well, in essence, it goes to purchase government bonds, and the money from the purchase of the government bonds becomes general tax revenue and is spent by the federal government on whatever it is the federal government does.
O'Reilly: All right. So let me stop you there. This is great. So they take the payroll money from all of us. They buy government bonds, which yield 5, 6 percent, in that range, right?
Tanner: Well, they only yield it in a technical sense because the government promises to pay itself interest.
O'Reilly: Right.
Tanner: But it's not any sort of actual transfer of cash. It's all a bookkeeping function.
O'Reilly: But the actual money that they take out of the Social Security fund flows right into the general fund, and it's spent on Jesse Jackson's tax-exempt organizations and everything like that, right?
Tanner: Well, it's spent on whatever the federal government does.
O'Reilly: This is out -- but this is crazy because if they had invested that money in anything for 50 years, all of those trillions of dollars would have brought more money back into the Social Security fund, right?
Tanner: Well, that's right. Now it's really only since 1983 that they've had large accumulated surpluses within the Social Security system.
O'Reilly: All right. So that's 18 years. We could have been making pretty good money, right?
Tanner: Well, that's right. It -- but you don't -- you've got to be careful. You don't want the government to be doing that investing.
O'Reilly: Oh, I don't want -- I don't -- all I -- all I want...
Tanner: ... proposed that individuals do that investing... through private individual accounts like President Bush has proposed.
O'Reilly: Fine. We've got to stay away from that right now, but what I'm trying to say is that the -- they're saying we don't have enough money for Social Security to cover the payments of the baby boomers, and the reason is that they have mismanaged that money, taken the money, and spent it on other things. They're are not telling us the truth.
Tanner: Well, you're absolutely correct in that that money is not really there. When they talk about a trust fund ... they're talking about a collection of IOUs. Now even if every IOU in that trust fund is redeemed, Social Security will still be some $21 trillion in debt. So this wouldn't solve the whole problem.
O'Reilly: Right, but if they had... invested the payroll tax that they have taken from us for 50 years -- and you say it only had a big surplus for 18 years -- invested it in gold bars, in anything, they would have had money coming back in. That's -- that's what the government is supposed to do, manage the money. We got -- we need more from you guys."
Tanner: Well, in essence, that -- that's exactly right. There is no savings or investment of any money in Social Security, neither the... The money is either paid out to beneficiaries, or it's spent by the government.
O'Reilly: So payroll tax -- Social Security money is supposed to be available to you and to me and to everybody watching, was spent on [Jesse Jackson's] Citizenship Education Fund and all these other things.
Tanner: On everything the federal government does. No -- none of it -- when you pay $1 in Social Security taxes, you have to understand, none of that money is saved for your retirement bill in any way.
O'Reilly: For Social Security. All right. Bingo! Mr. Tanner. Thank you very much.
Tanner: It's a pleasure.
O'Reilly: I hope everybody understands it now. "
Comrade Matsui doesn't share that hope.
He and his fellow Marxists in the NSDP also do not want Americans to understand that the money they pay into the Social Security system - those FICA taxes, are not stashed away in their names - it is not theirs. If you paid in all those thousands of dollars for years, and died at the age of 64 - a year before you would have been able to start collecting your Social Security benefits all that money you paid in would be gone. You couldn't leave it to your wife or your children - you couldn't because it wasn't your money to begin with.
This get us to the real point of this scam - The Social Security system has been foisted off on the American poeple as some kind of old age insurance - you pay in a certain amount on payday and it gets put away in your name and gradually builds up into a nice nest egg you can begin to collect when you hit 65. As we've seen that's hogwash. The Social Security system is a tax that's disguised to look like an insurance premium a nifty way of taxing working Americans without their knowing they're being taxed. And the government gets to keep all that money and spend it as wantonly as governments tend to squander tax monies.
That's why the Marxists are all het up about President Bush's plan to privatize part of the Social Security system and for all Americans to have some say over how their money is invested. That way Americans would own some of the money they put aside in their Social Security funds. But if Americans had the right to invest part of their money in approved investments, that money would belong to them and could not be confiscated and spent as tax revenues.
The Marxists insist that privatization won't work. But it has worked. In Chile. And worked damned well, as José Piñera, President of the International Center for Pension Reform and Co-Chairman of the Cato Project on Social Security Privatization has explained.
As Minister of Labor and Social Security from 1978 to 1980, he was responsible for the privatization of the Chilean pension system. In a presentation made at the Mont Pelerin Society's regional meeting in Cancun, Mexico, January 17, 1996 he revealed how privatization worked in his country.
"A specter is haunting the world," he began. "It is the specter of bankrupt state-run pension systems. The pay-as-you-go pension system that has reigned supreme through most of this century has a fundamental flaw, one rooted in a false conception of how human beings behave: it destroys, at the individual level, the essential link between effort and reward--in other words, between personal responsibilities and personal rights. Whenever that happens on a massive scale and for a long period of time, the result is disaster."
"In 1980, the government of Chile decided to take the bull by the horns. A government-run pension system was replaced with a revolutionary innovation: a privately administered, national system of Pension Savings Accounts.
"After 15 years of operation, the results speak for themselves. Pensions in the new private system already are 50 to 100 percent higher--depending on whether they are old-age, disability, or survivor pensions--than they were in the pay-as-you-go system. The resources administered by the private pension funds amount to $25 billion, or around 40 percent of GNP as of 1995. By improving the functioning of both the capital and the labor markets, pension privatization has been one of the key reforms that has pushed the growth rate of the economy upwards from the historical 3 percent a year to 6.5 percent on average during the last 12 years. It is also a fact that the Chilean savings rate has increased to 27 percent of GNP and the unemployment rate has decreased to 5.0 percent since the reform was undertaken.
"More important, still, pensions have ceased to be a government issue, thus depoliticizing a huge sector of the economy and giving individuals more control over their own lives. The structural flaw has been eliminated and the future of pensions depends on individual behavior and market developments.
"The success of the Chilean private pension system has led three other South American countries to follow suit. In recent years, Argentina (1994), Peru (1993), and Colombia (1994) undertook a similar reform. In the four South American countries, around 11 million workers have a personal retirement account."
I don't think Comrade Matsui and his cronies in the NSDP wanted you to know that. You have got to remain totally ignorant of the truth about Social Security. After all, it's just about the only issue they have left to scare the American people in election years. This year they really are desperate, too. They are obsessed with the idea that they have some kind of divine right to control both Houses of Congress and they hope that this is the year they'll realize that dream. And all they have left as an issue is Social Security.
I'll let this little colloquy between little George Stephanopolis and his colleague, Cokie Roberts deal with this as they did last week on ABC's Sunday Morning show as reported by the Media Research Center:
Stephanopoulos: "One of the things that Democrats take comfort in is is that the President's popularity in the war doesn't bleed over into other issues. The problem for them is they can't figure out what issues to use. There's not going to be a recession right now. They had a big strategy meeting two weeks ago where they said Social Security is going to be the issue."
Roberts: "Which is pretty pathetic, when you think about it. I mean, this is-"
Stephanopoulos, cutting her off in order to back the tactic’s potential: "Oh, I don't know. It's worked before."
Roberts: "Well, that's the whole point. That's all that they've got is this tired old Social Security issue."
And the lies that go with it.
Despicable!
Deus Exaudi-nos
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Marxist, Leninist, Communist, Socialist .. matters not, the goal is the same.
PS, I didn't see Matsui listed as a member of the "Progressives"; ie LIARS, he is the left hand of Pelosi these days , I believe. (What an ugly thought.)