Don't heed Bush's squawks
that the sky is falling
Stan Kurzman, Special to the Oakland Press
Oh my. Someone needs to enroll Mr. Kurzman in one of those support groups. Clearly this is a man in denial.
To his credit, Mr. Kurzman does align himself with the Michael Moore angry Blue before launching into his arguments that problems with Social Security system are "not all that difficult."... the solution being to increase the SS taxes for the rich.
Now that President Bush has announced that he will spearhead an election-style public relations campaign early next year to try to convince Americans that Social Security is in urgent need of change, we can expect more of the same false propaganda that supported the Bush agenda to invade Iraq.
Whether getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a good thing, the fact remains that the United States went to war based on false pretenses and with a significant change in policy - pre-emptive war. The Bush administration strategy was to create a major crisis - the threat of weapons of mass destruction - and thus convince the public that war was necessary.
The same strategy will soon be at work with Social Security.
Contine reading at link above
After this revealing prologue, Mr. Kurzman goes on to contend that the scare over the Ponzi'esqe program is "bogus". And of course portrays it as just another propaganda campaign and fear tactic by the current administration.
Not withstanding the fact that both Dems and Reps alike have been screaming about the solvency of SS for longer than I can remember, I couldn't disagree more with Mr. Kurzman's casual attitude and off the cuff cure.
Social Security is a flawed program from ground up. A nanny program that assumes we are incapable of providing for our own futures. Instead, they mandate $'s collected from tomorrow's beneficiaries to pay for today's recipients. For in fact, the first beneficiaries paid in considerably less what they collected
The first recipient of monthly Social Security payments was Ida May Fuller. Miss Fuller worked for about three years under the new Social Security program and paid $24.75 in payroll taxes. Her first Social Security check in January 1940 was for $22.54--she almost got her money back in her very first payment. Miss Fuller lived to be 100 years old and collected more than $22,000 in benefits.
Even tho today's generation has paid their SS dues, the fact remains we are constantly a degree of generations behind in the payout. Even the SS website admits the failings of a Ponzi scheme is "that it is difficult to sustain this game very long because to continue paying the promised profits to early investors you need an ever larger pool of later investors."
The differing opinions lie in what anyone considers "long" in "sustaining the game". Ponzi lasted merely days. THe SS website touts a primary argument that SS is not a Ponzi scheme by the labeling the continued operation since 1953 as a mark of "success".
It's not that the intent of a social security plan is undesirable in itself. Rather the argument is who is better at holding the purse strings until retirement - the federal gov't and spend happy Congresses? Or workers maintaining control over their own earnings?
Perhaps, had we had the option of buying into the program or not at inception, none of this would be an issue.
Now the best we can hope for is a graceful reversal so that those of us not yet eligible aren't robbed completely of all the cash we've paid in over the years.
Frankly, I wish they had let me keep and invest my own cash a long time ago. What I could accomplish with those funds now is mindboggling.
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