In fiscal 2003 that just ended, Social Security produced an $81.8 billion surplus. This was an overcharge paid by American workers in payroll taxes, extra money that the Social Security Administration did not need in order to meet all of its obligations to the currently retired and disabled. It is profit that could have been either refunded or invested properly so that it might have the chance to grow and provide better benefits for future retirees. But that’s not what happened.
Congress and the Bush administration stole this $82 billion. You might prefer to call it something more polite, like embezzlement, but it was outright theft.
Of course, the pirates will tell you that they simply “borrowed” this money. But who’s going to pay it back? Certainly not Congress or any future administration. At least not without fresh taxpayer money or legitimate borrowing. They have no other revenue and they sure as hell aren’t going to come up with it out of their own pockets.
To carry out the pretense of “borrowing,” the Beltway Bandits put markers in a debit black hole account that they deliberately and dishonestly label a “trust fund,” an account that never holds anything but debt and today accounts for 22 percent of the national debt.
In the last four years, they have stolen $364 billion this way. In the last ten years, they have stolen $615 billion of our retirement money.
This is bad enough, worse than anything done by Enron, WorldCom, and other crooks in the private sector. But it gets worse.
To carry out the “borrowing” scam, our crafty Beltway Bandits add annual interest to the black hole debit account. They do this by simply handing the Social Security trust funds more debt markers, more “special obligation” nonmarketable Treasury bonds. No money involved, but increasing our indebtedness.
Remember, the surplus is gone, spent, never to be seen again. It is now represented by debt markers. What the bandits call “IOUs” but are truly “UOUs” since it’s up to you or your children to pay them off someday.
In fiscal 2003, the trust fund increased $155.2 billion. Many news people will think that this increase was entirely due to surplus money generated by Social Security, but $73.4 billion was annual interest calculated on the balance that the trust fund held at the close of fiscal 2002, the previous year.
The cumulative total now stands at $1.5 trillion in what is commonly referred to as the Social Security trust fund, the combination of the Federal Old Age & Survivors Insurance trust fund and the Federal Disability Insurance trust fund. Both are fraudulent.
Here’s the way the Social Security trust fund increased month-by month during fiscal 2003, including interest:
This is the trust fund that the Beltway Bandits tell us will “sustain the Social Security system” until at least 2041. As the theft increases, so does the trust fund and the length of time Social Security can be “sustained” this way increases also. It was just a short time ago they were telling us that the trust would keep Social Security alive only until 2034.
In the real world, this means that the day the Social Security Administration must turn to its trust fund Americans will be double taxed plus interest. Workers will still be paying their payroll taxes, but on top of that every taxpayer in the country will also be paying to redeem the phony debt in the trust fund.
If you doubt that this will happen, witness the following that is happening right now, today, as you read this:
Because payroll tax receipts, contributed by employers, were not sufficient to meet the monthly commitments to the unemployed during fiscal 2003, the Labor Department cashed-in $25.9 billion of its bogus holdings in the Unemployment trust fund.
This means that the $25.9 billion necessary to pay benefits to the currently unemployed came either from the U.S. Treasury’s general fund of taxpayer dollars on hand or money borrowed honestly, openly, and under contract from investors (the “Public Debt” side of the national debt).
Nineteen different entitlement trust funds account for about 42 percent of the national debt under the deceptive label “Intragovernmental Holdings” and include, besides Social Security, the Military Retirement and Civil Service Retirement trust funds. These three are the biggies.
Fraudulent entitlement trust funds make up 93 percent of the Intragovernmental Holdings side of the national debt. The other seven percent is represented by about 122 equally bogus trusts for department, employee, and federal judge’s perks that function as hush money and make it difficult to sue the government in federal courts.
Simply name a trust, throw some bogus “nonmarketable” bonds in it, and draw the cash out of the Treasury’s general fund as needed. No employee or federal judge wants to lose the cushy retirement and health care plans provided this way.
What’s more, federal employees hold one of the nine real trust funds managed by the government. The Thrift Savings Plan allows employees to invest up to 10 percent of their salaries, 40 percent of which is matched by taxpayer dollars, in the Standard & Poors Index of the New York Stock Exchange handled by Barclay Bank of Great Britain, an account that returned an average of 17 percent on investment last year during a declining economy. Isn’t that nice?
Unless they are incompetent, every member of Congress understands this rip-off and none of them, including all of the hack candidates in the 2004 elections, are addressing this problem. If they don’t participate in the many finance, budget, tax, and other committees where expected entitlement surpluses are considered “off budget revenue” they receive it in reports from these committees as well as from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Office of Management and Budgets (OMB), and Government Accounting Office (GAO).
Taxpayers should be prosecuting every one of these pirates. At the very least, we should not re-elect them.
The ball is in your court. Stop the rip-off.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”