Don's Tuesday column

     THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   1/08/2013

Young students could figure it out

First, I’d like to invite anyone, particularly ideological opponents, to come to the Tea Party Patriots meeting tonight to view a DVD on Agenda 21. We will greet, make welcome and serve snacks and coffee to cynical critics and doubters alike; please watch, listen, take notes and share with readers your conclusions on the validity of our concerns and suspicions over the UN’s 20 year old efforts to sublimate America’s private property supremacy to mandated “sustainability” policies.

Secondly, I have just posted the 4,000^th article at Polecat News and Views (DonPolson.blogspot.com); page readership is modest by major-blog standards, but approaches 80,000 for the life of the blog. It is not monetized with ads, pop ups, auto-start audio, video, or banners; and is intended to provide a few really incisive and informative articles a day instead of a multitude of headlines and summaries.

Post 4,000 is “The giant, gaping hole in Sandy Hook reporting,” by David Kupelian of World Net Daily. Find out about the reliable link between mass shootings, Andrea Yates drowned children, the wannabe assassin of President Reagan, and mood altering drugs like Ritalin, Paxil and Prozac. This non-gun angle to mass killings is truly eye opening.

While a relatively miniscule percentage of unstable users are subject to “suicidal” or “homicidal” psychotic episodes, the use of such drugs goes much further to explain such murderous rampages than the guns that they usually had to illegally obtain. A family friend said Adam Lanza was “on medication and everything.” When will authorities release the names of psychiatric drugs he had used or ceased using (which has also triggered murderous rampages)?

If I had an imaginary group of young students, and was informing and testing them on their knowledge of the Social Security retirement system, it might go like this (names randomly chosen from relatives):

DP: When retirees receive a Social Security check, are they getting back their own money that they paid over the years?

Billy: No, their money was used to pay the folks that were retired at the time they were still working. People have always mostly received money that current workers were paying in taxes.

DP: But didn’t some money get deposited in their name in a separate account?

Davy: Actually not; they were entitled to funds from the system by qualifying for them with years worked and earnings. No one has ever literally gotten their own money back.

DP: What about the inception of the Social Security program? The first retirees didn’t literally receive other people’s money, did they?

Amy: Some of their own money may have been used for their SS checks, but the first retirees had not worked but a few years to qualify for benefits, and they would obviously never have paid enough in taxes over that short time to rely on. So, yes, they also mostly received other people’s money.

DP: But, help me out here by explaining why a program like Social Security was described as pre-paid retirement insurance with practical ownership of the funds in a person’s SS account for which they had a number.

Jimmy: Americans at that time, unlike now, had a really strong dislike of having money taken from one group and given, or redistributed, to another; it wasn’t looked on as the way American individualism and personal responsibility was meant to work. The politicians knew this and so made great efforts to hide the true nature of the first, grand effort to use the government to help the most vulnerable and helpless in America: the often enfeebled elderly.

DP: Hadn’t they had been cared for by family or in rest homes?

Patty: Social Security was supposed to never be a system, at least in design, which forced current workers to pay for other people’s parents out of their wages. The tax paying workers were led to believe that they were saving for their own retirement. In fact, each retiree, due to shorter life spans and being far fewer in relation to the tax paying workers, depended, unbeknownst to them, on between 15 and 20 workers. So, folks didn’t mind that surpluses built up in the system.

DP: I understand that each retiree is now supported by less than 5 workers, or soon will be, and that there are no longer any surpluses.

Ritchie: The surpluses quit being set aside back under President Johnson, and used to help fund the Great Society welfare programs and a new program for senior health care: Medicare. By using those surpluses, people were misled to think that there was enough money for those well-intended new programs that redistributed taxes from workers to beneficiaries.

DP: But aren’t there trillions of dollars in the SS Trust Fund?

Joey: Actually, there are only IOUs from the SS money being loaned out. There are no cash, or real, assets. We know that for a fact because when the debt-ceiling limit was in jeopardy of not being raised last year, the government had to admit that there was nothing with which to pay Social Security checks to retirees.

DP: No kidding; sounds like a fraudulent scam, a Ponzi-type of con game.

Class: Yes, it is!

“In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.” (Voltaire, 1764)