Insurance and Social Security IV Part 1

    I have had a good response from my request for others to chime in on the subject of understanding insurance and Social Security. Two more Political Associates have added some facts and their opinions.
    Before I quote below the writings of Anonymous 2, I want to pose this specific question to him. Should I be accepting Social Security payments? For many years, I paid my Social Security premiums or tax monthly and then also paid income tax annually on my Social Security receipts. I do not accept welfare or charity, and have considered my Social Security payments as neither of these, since I made a financial contribution.

    Anonymous 2 has confined his comments to Social Security. Here is what he has to say:

The seed that we planted has been eaten by the birds and there is no crop for the harvest.  The measly amount that the scheme pays to it benefactors is disgraceful considering their investment and the source of those funds currently paid is robbed from future generations.  Congress would investigate a scheme that took so much and paid so little.  To call this system a Ponzi Scheme is like calling JFK’s assassination a hunting accident.  No it is not a Ponzi Scheme, its worse.  A Ponzi scheme only lets those who want in the scheme to invest in the scheme.  SS coerces us to all be a part of it, to suffer for it, and to bear the guilt of it.  A scheme of such widespread, compulsory fraud is unprecedented in US history, and the most shameful of all of the Progressive schemes. Rationality and justice cry out that this atrocity be terminated – NOW!! 

    In a second response, Anonymous 2 also had the following comments:

At its inception SS looked like a benefit that would really help Americans.  It seemed like a fair deal, it was the Jewel in the Crown of the New Deal and the naïve public bought into the lottery, that’s right I said it is a lottery, that if, and it was a big if, but IF you did live to 65 you would not starve in your old age.  The act was signed 8/14/1935 by the FDR and taxes were first collected in January 1937.  Regular SS payments began in January 1940.

Life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed only 58 for men and 62 for women, and the retirement age was 65.  So FDR created a scheme that played on the social fears and social goodwill nerve of Americans, even though many would not actually benefit (hit the lottery) from it.  He sold it so that they accepted that this would not be voluntary, but a tax, they would have to join SS.  It created a great short term increase in the General Fund of the US and still everything was pretty kosher in the SS Lottery. In a 1936 publicity pamphlet (http://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/ssb36.html )describing the program to Americans, the Social Security Administration pledged that after 1949 the combined payroll tax rate of 6% would apply only to a worker’s annual income up to $3,000 and “that is the most you will ever pay.” Yet that 6% rate was breached under JFK (1962) and today’s rate (15.3%) is more than double the 1949 promised rate.  Worse, today’s high rate applies to as much as $106,800 of annual income, which is more than triple the inflation-adjusted equivalent of what $3,000 was worth in 1949 (i.e., $28,642). Thus instead of paying $1,718/year (6% on income as high as $28,642), we’re now forced to pay $16,340/year (15.3% on income as high as $106,800) – an increase of nearly ten-fold. It was, is, and will continue to be a lie.

Raiding the Social Security Trust Fund was a precedent set in 1968 by another progressive president, Lyndon B. Johnson, to help pay for the Vietnam War. To date, the federal government has borrowed over $2 trillion from the Social Security Trust Fund to spend on other programs.  They pay neither interest or principle on these ‘loans’.  They dug up the lottery’s treasure chest and it hasn’t been seen since.

Part 2 continued