Since the days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the advent of his Social Security program in 1935 Americans have been addicted to the false sense of security that the program provides. Â Social Security has given Americans the false perception that they and their families are insured against the economic woes inherent of things such as old age or disability. Â They have been duped into the belief that each month they make contributions to a trust that will one day be paid back to them or their families.
The reality of Social Security is far different than the one perceived by many Americans.  Social Security was first passed into law in 1935.  The federal government began collecting taxes to fund social security in 1937.  They also paid out one lump sum payment in the same year.  Regular monthly Social Security payments began in January of 1940.  There is only a three year gap between the time they began collecting taxes for Social Security and the time that they began making regular monthly payments.  This short time period made it impossible for the amount of money being paid out to those collecting Social Security to have been properly backed by the money that the same individuals paid in.  As a result, the money that one generation pays in is immediately paid out to the older generation that is collecting Social Security, and on other government expenditures.  An interest baring IOU is put into a “fund” in place of the money that the younger generation is paying in.  The debt and interest from these IOU’s continually accumulate, and given that most if not all funds paid into social security is immediately spent, the debt and interest is never paid.  This debt has ballooned, and like all pyramid schemes it will eventually come crashing down; which will be a disaster for this country.  The US federal government has mislead many unwitting American’s into believing that they are putting away their own money for the future; but this is simply not true.  If something is not done, the Ponzi scheme that is Social Security will cause another and far more damaging economic meltdown in this country.
The major problem with weaning the country off of Social Security is that no one wants to give up the money that they have paid into the system over the course of their careers. Â Many Americans have this sentiment: Â “I’m collecting Social Security when I retire, I’ve been paying into all this time. Â I want my money back.” Â This attitude is more than reasonable. Â Who can blame them? Â Who would want to give up money they have been saving all of their lives?
So lets try looking at Social Security in a different light. Â Obviously, any money that you paid into social security was paid out to someone else. Â So, essentially you have been stolen from all of your life. Â Also, any money that you draw from social security will be money paid in by someone else. Â So, essentially you are taking someone else’s money against his will.
Now, maybe drawing social security seems justified to you because you have been stolen from all of your life, and now it is your turn to be paid back. Â Sounds reasonable doesn’t it? Â But is it really? Â Well, imagine that you are a bank owner, and everyday that your bank is open for business masked gunmen come in and rob it. Â They don’t steal all of your money though. Â They just take a little bit everyday. One day you decide to get out of the banking business, and you want to get back all of the money that was stolen from you. Â Is it then justifiable for you to go and rob other banks in order to get your money back?
I would hope that you answered no. Â In that same vain. Â It is not justifiable for any man to steal from younger generations even if he has been stolen from by older generations. Â Theft cannot be justified in any capacity. Â The time has come for us to accept our duty to preserve liberty and prosperity for future generations. Â We must not leave debt to be paid by our children and grandchildren. Â American’s must make the difficult decisions now, so that future generations will have the same opportunities that we did. Â This is the duty of every generation.
“The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
-Thomas Jefferson, 1816
Cross Posted From: libertyandpride.com
@John ryan: Are you kidding? No one even implied that we want older generations homeless and living in the streets. On the contrary, I have great respect for older generations (they are certainly more respectable than my own, for the most part). This is about a social redistribution program that was masked behind the idea of “insurance.” Social security was doomed from the start.
@John ryan
Really? REALLY???
Is that it?!? You actually took the time to fire-up Mom’s computer, Get the Homepage up, navigate here, read a few comments, and at some point after absorbing new data, the best your mind could formulate was, THAT?
REALLY?!
You have beclowned yourself. Back to the shallow end of the pool with you.
Here…don’t forget your floaties.
@John ryan:, why don’t you ask that question of the thieves in Congress who robbed the SS “lockbox” because they were handed the keys to it by Dem Pres, Johnson… as eloquently laid out by @Tim O’Flaherty above. (BTW, stick around, Tim… you’re a great voice to add to FA).
Seems to me robbing the elderly under color of law is what you should be in an uproar about, dude. But then, you never stick around to clean up your dumps anyway.
MataHarley:
Thank you for your kind comments. I work as a Latin and ancient Greek teacher and did my graduate work in Roman law. With my students, even my liberal ones, I have been able to educate them on the sheer unconstitutionality of the whole welfare state, to include this nasty health care bill. Many of my students have come over to my point of view. Up here in Massachusetts, it’s sort of like being behind enemy lines. More simply, from each according to their means, to each according to their needs is merely a rationalization for theft. But you know that.
Again, thanks for pointing out to John Ryan that his statements are ignorant dribble, too.
Well now, Tim O’Flaherty… aren’t you a rare bird in your field. Not only a prof, but a prof in MA. You do have an uphill battle. And on behalf of us who don’t live on campus for our careers, let me say we appreciate those actually presenting the pros and cons of political issues (and I assume you do), and still succeeding in seeing the light bulb turn on when they recognize what is befitting the America as created by Framers and Founders vs the big Zero’s progressive plan of “remaking” the same.
I tend to agree with Mata. 10 years ago, when I was 40, I would have given every dollar in my SS account back if I could have been spared from SS and FICA taxes for the remainder of my life. This would allow me to reinvest it and probably make more than I would be disbursed in the time I had left.
At 50, I’m much less inclined to do that.
Another take on this is that the reason the Ponzi scheme is not working is because the boomers decided they wanted to contracept and abort the next generation of working citizens.
So you don’t have a bunch of children who can share the burden of you in your old age, nor do you have a number new warm bodies to pay taxes to help support you.
That having been said, when my wife and I started investing in my retirement at 25, we did our financial planning based on no SS and no pensions controlled by someone else. I was responsible for my own financial future.
If my wife and I get SS when we retire, that’s an extra vacation trip for us. If we don’t get it, then we won’t be eating dog food.
Tim O, “from each according to their means”, now that we know your means, we will of course expect some material that will enlighten us with your knowledge of the ancients and their wisdom. I don’t want to put pressure on you; however, sooner is better than later.
We wage a desperate battle, although ours is a safe battle free from injury, we have associates and loved ones in a real battle overseas. Our battle is similar to yours, we fight with ideas and cyber keyboards: we fight for the very Freedoms that we were given at birth, freedoms provided by those who fought desperate battles and sometimes gave the last measure of devotion so that we would not lose those same freedoms. At this time it is a relatively safe battle we fight, yet we all know, if Marxism wins the battle, many of us have already committed grievous malfeasance against the cause of International Socialism and the Marxist doesn’t tolerate thinking that deviates beyond the Party Line.
So I am asking you to share your wit and wisdom and write a damn article!
@Mr. Tim O’Flaherty
Of Worcester Academy? (And other fine NON public shools.)
Major Tim O’Flaherty of the MA National Guard, who served with KFOR-8 in Kosovo?
The guy who wrote the cartoon: “Free Lunch”? (Prandium Liberum)
THAT Tim O’Flaherty?
😉
Uh, Patvann, yep!
You caught me red handed! Well done. You should teach the editorial staff at the NYT how to use the web to do research.
Have we served together? I’m assuming that you know of “Prandium Liberum” from some sort of interaction with me in paths long ago crossed…
Let me know. If you’re indeed a former colleague, shoot me an email on AKO. My username is timothy.oflaherty.
@Major O’Flaherty
We did not serve together, but I could not get the name from not ringing around in my head.
Then I remembered a PDF my cousin (A Colonel who was in Kosovo in 2006) sent me, and sure enough, in it was an article about the cartoon you made while stationed there. (Which seems to not be available anywhere, but I remebered she loved it.)
Then I just Googled yer butt, and found that PDF, along with the other stuff. 🙂
My service ended in 1985. I was mostly in S. America, and saw time in Grenada while with Navy SeAL Team 5, ST-2. I left as an E-5 Petty officer 2nd Class.
Skookum:
How about an article on inflation in the late Empire that eventually led to the centralized govenments of Ravenna and Constantinople to bring Ostrogoths and Visigoths into the Empire as “foederati” to serve in the legions because regular Romans wouldn’t accept the circulated currency of the centralized government for pay in those same legions? Or, in other words, how Roman is the Roman army when the Roman army “sprechen zie deutche” and is completely unassimilated to Latin manners and ways? As I put it to my students: “Yeah, all of those illegals coming into the US from Mexico, unassimilated, not speaking English…Don’t worry about it. Everything is fine. Nothing to see here. Move on.” (they get the sarcasm because I don’t say this until I explain the policy of the Late Roman Empire and the “foederati”). Many people don’t know that one of the reasons that the emperor Honorius had Stilicho executed, and later his son and wife, was that Alaric, who sacked Rome in 410 AD was, in fact, the second cousin to Stilicho. Who knew? The Romans knew and they needed a “fall guy” for the sack, and Stilicho, who was the highest commander in the western empire, a second cousin to Alaric, was accused of allowing the sack of Rome. Alaric was a German; so was Stilicho. So much for assimilation.
Indeed, I speculate that the real reason both major political parties agitate to bring illegals into the amnesty process is that they are both desperate to fill the ratio of workers to retirees to continue the ponzi Social Security scam (See the thread above). If 44 million illegals are made citizens, assuming that number isn’t inflated, then – Voila! – you no longer have to panic about a 1.8:1 worker to retiree ratio in 2030 left to fund Social Security via withholding, and you can boost it up to, say, approximately 7:1 or so, and shore up the system without actually having to fix it. And if all of those illegals, whose withholding taxes you’re now collecting in D.C. for medicare, medicaid and social security, start voting for your political party in gratitude for giving them express ticket to the American dream, well, that’s just gravy, cf. Lindsey Gramm’s efforts in this arena. The problem for the political class, of course, is that no matter how they try to spin amnesty it never flies with the regular non-political public at large who scratch their head wondering if D.C. has lost its collective mind trying to give the benefits of U.S. citizenship to people who’s first act upon entering this country is to break its laws, which our political class, out of expediency to fill the coffers in D.C. to keep the vote buying machine fully operational via payroll taxes withheld amongst the newly minted “citizens,” conveniently ignores (those same immigration laws presently on the books).
Of couse, even if you wanted to me to write a column or two, where would I do so?
V/r
Tim O
PATVANN i have a simple but might be good IDEA..when the time come to elect a leader we should in advance search his spending habit going back many years so that would be a first and very important quality if he pass the test..bye
@Tim O’Flaherty: Tim, if you want to write a post, just look in the top navigation bar, click on submit post, and write away! If your previous comments are any indication I have a feeling it’s going to be good!
Patvann:
Hooah! Navy Seal Team. Awesome. Good job in Grenada, too.
Prandium Liberum is actually a computer animated series of shorts, designed as a pilot for episodic television, thirty minutes each, cf. “The Simpsons,” etc., for broadcast/cable television. It’s very labor intensive and requires a lot of computer memory for the rendering. What you saw in the PDF was a series of renderings of character developments for the later animated characters. Who was the LTC who liked them so? Or must she remain annonymous?
Tim O
Shades of Victor Davis Hansen. 🙂
Why, here at Flopping Aces, of course!
Skooks works late, so while he’s literally got his hands in a horses mouth, I’ll step in.
I’m not so sure that both parties want/need the illegals for SS. That would assume that they have some sort of “fix” in mind for the problems they’ve incurred.
In my view, what the Repubs want is cheap labor, and the Dems want more folks held in state-sponsored dependency.
Thanks, Sean:
I’ve been a big fan of Flopping Aces for some time now, always reading its posts; today was the first time I have ever posted (I usually refrain from doing so). I must confess that I was both pleasantly and happily surprised by the warm reception. It’s good to be amongst like minded colleagues.
Tim O
i just read ..President give thumbs-up to US immigration BILL outline says legislation is next step 47 minutes ago from MACLEANs.canews..was on my GOOGLE page
@Tim
Team 4 had a tragic time in Grenada, and the rest of us did our best to make up…Had to secure the airport (with half of us now missing in the drink), and a radio transmitter.
Zalewski was her name back then.
Patvann:
I agree with your analysis of what the parties both want with the amnesty, but I see those as subsidiary side-benefits. I believe – Although I cannot prove it and a “hunch” is in no way scientific! – that the political class is acutely aware of the impending insolvency of the Federal fisc and will do anything – And I do mean anything! – to plug that funding hole. Not only will they turn on the printing press and inflate the currency to hide their debts, but they will expedite into the body politic more “citizens,” illegal or otherwise, who can pay more taxes into the system than they will ever collect. The political class knows that they are using off-book accounting. From their point of view, the senior set will vote for them as long as the checks come. The illegals made “legal” will facilitate that process via their withholdings, which will be the transfer payments to the senior set. Of course, if health care becomes law – Heaven forbid! – the political class will be back to square one because there’s just is not that much money available to fund this thing. The present unfunded liabilities of the Federal Government (these are numbers from the Saint Louis Federal Reserve branch published white paper in October 2008, right before the crash, and Mr. Fischer, President of the Dallas Federal Reserve Branch from an interview in the June 2009 WSJ) are approximately 107 Trillion – Yep! I said “Trillion”! – dollars, which is the combination of VA benefits, Federal Government employee pensions, Social Security obligations, Medicaid and Medicare all combined. To put that number into perspective, 107 Trillion US Dollars is one third more wealth than all of the countries on the Earth combined, from Amsterdam to Zimbabwe. So, even if we taxed all inhabitants of the Earth 100% percent of all of their assets, the Federal Government would still be short approximately 30 Trillion US Dollars to meet its debt obligations.
I could be wrong, of course, and I admit that this is an unproven hypothesis. That said, your observation about the Republicans not being as strong advocates for illegal immigrant blanket amnesty as the Democrats is the fact that our base is becoming more and more conservative and not tolerating this sort of behavior from our party leaders, which explains, I think, both your observations and Senator John McCain’s travails as he actually has a viable primary challenger. In other words, our own purging of RINOs is producing a better GOP. Slow, grueling work, but, little by little we are making progress.
My two cents (for what they’re worth),
Tim O
TimO, I hope I have not been presumptuous; here at FA I am a private, I try to publish every week, but I am a private none the less. Curt is our Field Marshal and an excellent one at that; I have appointed myself as a semi-official rabble rouser, Curt hasn’t told me to mend my unorthodox methods, so I continue on damning all torpedoes. Curt is the one who approves the articles, the characters on the right are all field grade officers and have official duties far beyond my poor power to add or detract. They are all sharp and know their way around the website if you have a question.
In all seriousness, I have invoked my humble knowledge of history a few times to draw an analogy to contemporary politics while employing a certain flair for mediocrity. Your knowledge of Greek and Roman history leaves me standing flat footed and I am anxious to read your ideas. You can key in my name in the banner above one of my articles and get a feel for what I have published in FA.
I envy your profession and respect the challenges you face. Thank goodness we have at least some people like you in our halls of higher learning.
The immigration problem is a popular item, so popular in fact, that finding a new and unique view that will capture readers is a challenge. The group likes interesting bytes of history, especially when it has an application to either national or international politics.
There is a small box to the right of each page that is titled reader submission. I am sure you can navigate from there without my assistance. I look forward to your prose, I am an avid amateur history buff.
Welcome aboard! Skook.
Thanks, Skookum.
There are many parallels between the Roman Empire’s immigration policies and what we are doing today vis-a-vis the southwest United States. Indeed, the province of Ratia is now Switzerland, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that they don’t speak a lot of Romance languages around Lake Geneva.
That said, let me take that angle and see if I can find parallels with our present governments policies, immigration-wise.
I might point out as an appetizer, that the Late Empire was under enormous financial stress, and was eager to find manpower wherever it could be acquired, cheaply. Here’s something else to consider, too: just like some have speculated that Obama is alien to the American experience, so to were the emperors of the Late Empire. Many don’t realize that Diocletian, for example, came up through the ranks in the Balkans, was not even born in Italy; in fact, he was emperor for ten years before he ever stepped foot in Rome itself. Perhaps some type of angle on assimilation and immigration; how the Romans dealt or failed to deal with it, and, maybe, the Empire’s dissolution.
Who knows? Give me time, though. I’ve got a lot of stuff going on.
V/r
Tim O
TimO, the immigration solution is at best a fiscal band aid and becomes more of a liability as we become assimilated by the Hispanic Culture of Mexico. I think this is a problem that has been anticipated by the general population, but the fear is nebulous in that we lack the historical perspective to draw parallels.
This debt picture is one of the more frightening situations I have ever heard. Compromising our situation with further entitlements and programs that retard economic activity seems suicidal. A situation representative of only 20% of the figures you mention portray a catastrophic melt down in the near future, surely importing millions of unskilled laborers will only retard efforts at reconstruction.
Please tell us more, in small doses please!
Skookum:
I certainly don’t mean to startle! I promise smaller morsels next time! For now, however, I must call it a night!
You’ll hear from me again soon, however. Hopefully, with a submission to the Field Marshal.
Tim O
And Skookum:
Rereading your note, I realized that the point you observed regarding the Southwest that the “immigration solution is at best a fiscal band aid and becomes more of a liability as we become assimilated by the Hispanic Culture of Mexico” is exactly spot on. The Romans didn’t solve this problem either. The result: modern Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
There’s an old saw about Europe that goes like this: if you could draw an imaginary line across Europe that divided those regions that predominantly drink wine from those regions that predominantly drink beer, that line would fall approximately where the furthest extent of the Roman Empire was in northern Europe. That said, the Rhine River is no longer a “Romance,” i.e. evolved from Latin, speaking region, is it? Nope. It’s German and became so only in the fifth century AD because the centralized government, for selfish, short-term, politcally expedient reasons, allowed Germans to enter the Empire. Think of Trier, Germany, the birthplace of Marx and the ancient capital of Constantine the Great. At one time it was thoroughly Romanized; today, it’s Germanic. In the long-term, these unassimilated “barbarian” elements within the borders of the Roman Empire became the vehicle which utimately, in the end, brought about the Empire’s dissolution when, finally in the year 476 AD, it was a German chieftain, Theoderic, who deposed the last Roman emperor, ironically named after the legendary and traditional founder of Rome, and its first emperor (a dimunitive) under whom Christ was born, Romulus Augustulus, and made himself king over Italy and the Romans.
“Fiscal bandaid,” indeed.
Well said.
Tim O
TIMo i am impress as i read of your knowledge thank you you are a treasure like the others in my box,bye