Saving Social Security by Reorientation of Thought

We've all heard that Social Security needs to be fixed, its trust fund being only a scheme which stole our money, the people concocting it long ago retired and now collecting fat pensions. In fact, the trust fund was such a con that the late Senator Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat from New York, wanted to repeal it and the extra tax that went with it.

Social Security has been called a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi; of course, was a notorious "financial investor"who paid out lavish sums to his customers. It was too good to be true because it was, for Ponzi used the huge payouts as advertisement about his financial acumen to lure new investors whose money he was actually using to pay older ones. There were actually no investments at all, just investors. In the meantime, he lived like a king. Unfortunately for his dupes, eventually he ran out of investors at the bottom to feed the ones at the top. Ponzi went to jail, and everyone who invested with him went bankrupt.

The government doesn't go to jail though for Ponzi schemes and even so, it's now past that point as the middle aged worry about Social Security being there for them, especially after having paid so much in taxes supporting the program.

So how to solve the Social Security dilemma? It revolves around reorienting our thinking. For instance, if you had told someone in the 1880’s that you were going to the ocean to swim, he would have thought you were insane. The ocean was where sharks and other dangerous creatures lived. People just didn’t go into the ocean, not deliberately. Now, it’s almost expected that we swim at the beach. It was a reorientation of thought.

And so too we must reorient our thinking on something as serious as Social Security because you cannot end Social Security without displacing 70% of the aged. What about other options?

Not a Social Security stock trust fund. The government owning businesses, which is what stock ownership is, is called communism; not that those favoring it have bothered to read civics books to find that out. If the citizen owns the stocks in a private account through the government, the government will eventually rule and control it, and that's fascism. ( Yes I know, 401 K's. Well there's a bill in Congress to confiscate them). And a trust fund using bonds allows some long dead politician in the past to rob the young of the present of a whole bunch of money for that dead politician's past re-election.

The solution and reorientation? A massive downsizing of government with the money saved used for Social Security and Medicare. You cannot have everything. Liberals and progressives don't understand this. There have to be a priorities.

For instance, President Eisenhower when leaving office advised President Kennedy to bring the troops home from Europe. Europe has more people than us and more money. They can afford their own defense. The real reason we're over there is to protect Europe from Germany rising again. However, we can't be the eternal vampire hunter.

Departments like Commerce, Labor, and Education etc. are luxuries not necessities. We could get any data as collected from Labor or Commerce privately. Google tracks us, and we don't even ask them. The Education Department was a payoff to teachers' unions, it's not for the students' benefit.

Remember, eventually all the baby boomers will die and then the ratio of old to young will be fiscally reasonable again. And we'll have done a great service for that generation by killing big government and saving Social Security.

By