2011 A.D.: The Financial Robbery Of U.S. Retirees By Their Government
When Social Security was implemented and everyone was forced to begin paying into the program, the entire workforce - young and old - began paying in, even though there were not too many people that needed to receive it yet. With much coming in and little going out the Social Security Trust Fund (the 'savings account' for all this incoming Social Security money) began to swell astoundingly. In time it became one of the largest piles of money on the planet. And this deposit was built up from real money coming out of real paychecks. This was money which would have gone into the wallets and purses of working Americans. It was real money that could have been spent on their families. But instead, the government took it by legal force, promising to use it to ensure that those who retired would be cared for.
As most of us know, time went by, and the sight of that gargantuan pile of money became too much for Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen to resist any longer. There it was, promising to bridge shortfalls that they occasionally faced, fund programs that they dreamed of implementing, pay for military ventures; this mountainous pile of revenue taunted them, saying "You cannot touch me. I belong to your grandparents, your aging father and mother, even to you some day. But not until you are retired. Until then, you can only look at me, but not touch."
Washington eventually decided that there was no reason that this pile of cash needed to sit there unused. They could just re-route the incoming Social Security money directly to the outgoing Social Security revenue stream, and that made that big old pile of money .... well, superfluous. And, as they were eager to assert, rightfully theirs to squander, I mean 'hold in trust'. And if there was ever a funding mismatch, well...a little could be taken from the remains of that pile that was being held in trust. It was a very big pile of money, after all.
And so, laws were made allowing our elected and appointed leaders to get their greedy paws on Grandma and Grandpa's money. And oh my Gosh did they ever shovel it furiously in the direction of their desires. If you took $50 million dollars, you just left a $50 million dollar IOU (a 'special bond' actually) in the Social Security repository so that Grandma and Grandpa would know that you just borrowed the money temporarily for a very important reason. You hadn't stolen it.... you left an IOU (I Owe You). You actually left a 'special bond' that they could theoretically redeem someday.
Flash forward to today....2011 A.D. How is that Social Security Trust Fund doing? Sadly, it is no longer doing well at all! It is gone. It is essentially completely and totally gone. It is filled with IOU's left by the looters of Grandma and Grandpa's piggy bank. And worst of all, according to what I have read there is no agency or department of the Federal Government that is willing, or is authorized, or which has the money to redeem the IOU's (oops! I mean 'special bonds') There ought to be 2.6 trillion dollars in there by some people's report. Other people think closer to 1 trillion. Instead, there is nothing. It has all been stolen.
Congress still tries to use incoming Social Security money to pay the needed outgoing Social Security money. When there is a shortfall, it borrows. And as if to put an honest face on the matter, they count the lost trust fund money as part of the 14.3 trillion-dollar debt. But no branch of our government ever makes an effort to restock the Social Security Trust Fund. Those IOU's are very likely never going to be replaced with the money that they stood in for in the first place. It's just not going to ever be on the list of Congressional things to do.
This constitutes one of the largest thefts of all time. This constitutes one of the largest betrayals of all time. This is one of the wickedest acts in U.S. history. And worst of all, a very great number of congressmen and Presidents and Vice Presidents, etc., either were aware it was going on, or benefitted from it, took part in it, or even oversaw the distribution of the loot.
Where there was once 2.6 million dollars in honestly earned money, commandeered for this government entitlement program called Social Security, there exists only the worthless IOU's left by the Godless crooks who financially raped our old people.
So, what can be done?
I think at the very least, this should be done: If these IOU's are as good as money, good enough for the average Joe Retired Citizen to rely on, then those same IOU's should be good enough for all of the involved congressmen, appointees, Presidents, etc., to survive on....to retire on. I suggest that we take the IOU's in the Social Security Trust Fund and convert them to IOU's of $1,000.00 increments or smaller, and we use these small denomination IOU's to pay the owed retirement compensation of every single person that was involved with or reasonably should have known about this remorseless and indescribably shameful financial rape and robbery of America's retired elderly. Every month, every retired Washington accessory to this sad crime should receive an envelope in the mail full of the required amount of these small denomination IOU's to equal the number of dollars of their expected retirement check. Let's see them try to find someplace that will treat those slips of paper as money!
And if they should ever go crying to their unretired peers, active congressmen, asking that some agency or department be ordered to treat these worthless IOU's as money, then great. I hope they succeed. Because then we'll have a place to go with Grandma and Grandpa's 2.6 trillion in unredeemable IOU's.
The Lord tells us not to steal. He tells us not to lie. He tells us to honor our Father and Mother. So, we can't say that robbing our Mother and Father and giving them worthless paper in return, then lying by saying it's a righteous use of the money that was entrusted to the Social Security program in order to save face, is honoring our Mother, our Father, or anyone. Washington D.C. is a flock with a wolf hiding in it. It is in our best interest to rid ourselves of this wolf. Washington D.C. is a place for Representatives, not Reprehensibles. I think our government needs to hold a congressional investigation into this and come up with the names of the engineers and the most involved players.
I have read that Lyndon Johnson and a largely Democratic congress ripped into this fund. I have read that President Reagan and Allen Greenspan in 1983 were chief players in opening up the Social Security Trust Fund to general usage. Ouch! I hadn't known that, and if it's true I'm sorry about it. Both political parties seem to have, by degree, changed the definition of this Social Security Trust Fund from being a repository for excess funds not currently needed for outgoing payments, into a 'pay as you go' type of fund that never had been meant to be a repository.
Yes, it eventually came to be that people's payments coming into the system were immediately used to cover obligations that had to be paid out. And so, in a crooked way of thinking, it is true that the pile of money that had built up became 'unnecessary' to the program. And that is how the government, by degree, pretended to gain legitimate ownership of that very large pile of money that had actually and truly accumulated for the potential use of our elderly retired.
There is a lot to learn about concerning this issue, and there have been many incursions into the Social Security Trust Fund revenue over about 5 decades. It was robbery by degree. But it's just too big a thing to ignore, and there will be many well-known names among those involved if an investigation ever occurs. But...it needs to occur anyway. And the people that did the plundering need to be treated as criminals, because they can be seen as little else, really. People are getting their Social Security checks, but...there was a pile of money that built up, and someone has stolen it. It has been squandered. And it was never their money to steal. It was Grandma and Grandpa's money.
Various government figures have financially raped and pillaged our old, arrogantly and without the public assent (essentially without the public even knowing that they were doing it). We are not fit as a nation to survive if we don't call this sort of thing a crime. Crimes involving money will never rank with abortion or killing in seriousness, certainly not with open national shows of disrespect towards our Maker, but America is largely blind to those crimes, whereas you can always get most of us Americans to at least care about money.
God help and forgive us all for caring that much about money. But still.... this is a crime that stinketh mightily, and we are a Christian nation. We are supposed to love God with all of our heart, our soul, our strength, and our mind, and love our neighbor as ourselves. Loving God means behaving as we know He wants us to. I'm a guilty sinner, but I'm pointing a finger at this anyway. And the ten commandments describe important behaviors that God expected us to try to adhere to. Of these, honoring our parents was one such commandment. Not coveting our neighbor's goods was another. So, this ought to be taken seriously, both as a moral betrayal, and quite probably a legal one, on a scale seldom seen. It ought to be addressed, not repeated, not ignored, and not forgotten. The Social Security Dust Fund. Just an empty dusty room with a few paper IOU's laying around. Way to go, Washington! Way to earn that trust.