News Flash! ‘Social Security’ is running out of money. A better example of an oxymoron cannot be made when it comes to ‘Social Security.’ And Wall Street is not to blame. The blame lies in the robber barons on Capitol Hill.
For years, the Social Security trust fund has taken in more than it spent on benefits, resulting in a cushion of billions of dollars that the government could spend on other programs while giving the trust fund an IOU.
Emphasis added. Notice the assumption that spending money from your retirement fund is OK because, hey, you’re not retired yet. You don’t need it now. In the private sector, its called a felony. Now the biggest Ponzi scheme in the world is about to collapse. The fact that the Johnson administration was taking retirement money from individual citizens didn’t seem to bother anyone.
It was in the Johnson administration in the 60’s that politicians thought it was a shame that they couldn’t use that money for things like his ‘Great Society.’ And the Great Society got us Medicare, Medicaid, and the War (without an exit plan) on Poverty. Since then, politicians in both parties became drunk on spending from this big pot of gold which is now almost empty. It provided the seed money to greatly expand government programs and entitlement programs to levels that would, long term, be unsustainable on their own.
Warnings that this time would come have been sounded by economists and conservatives for years. Efforts to reform Social Security, to reverse the trend to insolvency, fell on deaf ears during the 16 years of Clinton and Bush. The spineless in Washington lack the will to fix it as it was originally intended to be.
But have no fear. The good news is President Obama doesn’t think it is a problem. Have you heard him or his teleprompter say that the Social Security system needs fixing yet? In fact, the bad news coming out today about Social Security is playing right into his hands.
There is no need to try to save Social Security. Individualism, the very concept of saving for your own future, is so last century. President Obama’s fix for Social Security is to simply continue nationalizing those industries that the country depends on. Soon, the news of collapse will be so intense that America will look to him to save us from peril. Enter Barack Obama and his teleprompter, and Americans will succumb to Obama’s new and improved socialist America. Of course he won’t call it that. But that’s what we’ll get.
Trying to save the Constitution and this country as we know it is just too much work when half the population, Washington, and the media no longer take it seriously. That’s the way it seems after continuing barrages of bad economic news. It is Rahm Emanual’s ‘rule one‘ on steroids. Taking advantage of a crisis is one thing. Prolonging chaos to keep the crisis going to advance an agenda is quite another.
link: Annual report due for Social Security and Medicare