Please visit my website at    http://thebiglie.net/

I have been a writer since I was a small child.  One of the things I most wanted for Christmas, one year, was a toy typewriter. I got it, and I could actually type on it.  It had only one key to push down on, but it had a print wheel with all the letters on it.  If you wanted to type the letter "q," you just turned the wheel until the "q"  was in the print position, and then pushed down on the large single key.  I was so proud to see my words in print that I gave that little toy typewriter a good workout. Once I had seen my words in print, I knew that I would be a writer all my life.

I also had an equally strong passion for studying about the economy.  Our family was the poorest family in the whole community.  The old weathered farmhouse showed no evidence that it had ever been painted. We didn’t have electricity, so I had to do my homework in the dim light of a kerosene lamp.  But that wasn’t the worst part.  The worst part was that we also did not have indoor plumbing.  I remember so well those trips to the outhouse when the temperature was below zero and having to use pages from an old Sears catalog for toilet paper.  Those Indiana winters were severe, and trips to that old outhouse are still among the most vivid negative memories that I have. 

I was puzzled by how poor we were and how well off so many others were.  Dad worked hard on that little Indiana farm, but he and Mom just had too many babies to make it on so little income.  Growing up, I never thought there would be any way that I could go to college, but President Eisenhower changed all of that when he signed into law the National Defense Education Act, which opened the door to low-interest loans for college students.  After working and borrowing my way through Ball State University, I taught high school Social Studies for two years before borrowing my way through four years of graduate school at Indiana University to earn a Ph.D. degree in economics.

I share these things to help readers understand why I have felt a responsibility to use much of my writing talent and time for writing about Economics and Social Security.  But before I get into that, which most readers people will probably find rather boring, please allow me to tell you about what I like to write.

I love to do inspirational writing in an attempt to lift people's spirits, and I also love to write Children's novels. 

On July 14, 1994. I tried a little experiment.  I wrote a short inspirational essay and submitted it to a small weekly newspaper in Toledo, Illinois.  I was trying to determine whether or not I had the ability to inspire people through my writing.  

I had always loved meaningful quotations, so I decided to begin the essay with an inspirational quotation which would set the tone for the piece.  If my memory is correct, I used the following quotation from Helen Keller to set the tone for that first essay. 

"I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something" 

The editor liked the essay and asked me to write a similar column every week.  But I wondered how long I would be able to write weekly columns without losing my ability to inspire.  That was nineteen years ago, and my column still appears in that local paper. every week.  Over the years, the column appeared in larger papers  for at least a few years.  The Paducah Sun in Paducah, Kentucky ran the column in their Sunday paper, on the religion page, for many years.  Other papers ran it on their editorial page. 

As time passed and I became so involved in my other writing, I decided to phase the column out.  I quit recruiting new suscribers and decided that I would continue to supply it to those papers still using it until they all dropped the column.  It will be twenty years next July since I published that first column in the Toledo, Illinois paper.  In addition to that paper, the column still appears every week in two small Arizona newspapers, one in Tennesse and one in Virginia.

With regard to my children's novels, I have just added the first one, "Andrew Rockefeller Ford, III" to Authors Den.

Andy Ford and Dave Jackson are garbage collectors in the small town of Pepperville. They get paid for hauling people’s garbage away in little red wagons hitched to their bikes. They take the garbage out to Mr. Warner’s farm at the edge of town and sell it for chicken feed.

They’re good kids, but some of the older people, consider the boys a menace and a disgrace to the town. They harass the boys and try to force them out of business. The conflict between the boys and some of the older residents makes a hilarious tale.

Nobody can read this book without doing a lot of laughing.  I guarantee it. It's a little laughing machine that can generate a lot of laughter.  I am so confident that nobody can read this book without laughing, that I will put a five dollar bill in an envelope and mail it to you, if you get through the book without laughing. Just email your mailing address to me and wait for your five dollars to arrive in your mailbox, IF YOU GET THROUGH THE BOOK WITHOUT LAUGHING.  

The Kindle ebook is currently available from Amazon.com for only 99 cents.  If you do as much laughing as I think you will, that will be a real bargain.  On the other hand, if you manage to get through the book without laughing (accomplish the impossible), you will get your 99 cents back plus $4.01 bonus.  You can't lose, and you might win big.  How much llaughing can you buy for 99 cents anywhere else? 

My high school textbook, Understanding Economics, which was published by Random House, was used in more than 600 schools, nationwide.  For the past thirteen years, I have been engaged in a relentless campaign to expose the Social Security fraud.  While doing research for a book in 2000 I stumbled onto what I now consider to be the “greatest fraud ever perpetrated against the American people by their own government.” 

President Reagan, with the assistance of Alan Greenspan, convinced Congress and the American people that there was a need for a big Social Security payroll tax increase in 1983, which would generate surplus revenue for the next 30 years, in order to build up a large reserve with which to help fund the retirement of the baby boomers, who would begin retiring  in 2010.  That payroll tax hike generated $2.7 trillion in surplus revenue over the period 1983 to 2010, when the annual surpluses came to an end and permanent annual Social Security deficits began. 

That $2.7 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue was supposed to have been saved and invested in marketable U.S. Treasury bonds, which could be resold when needed to raise cash for paying benefits to the boomers.  But none of the surplus Social Security money was saved or invested in anything.  The government simply took the surplus revenue and deposited it in the general revenue fund.  The money has been used to pay for unfunded wars and other programs.  This is the big fraud that I stumbled onto in 2000.  At first, I refused to believe my findings.  It seemed just too awful to suggest that the government was using Social Security money for other programs.  But it didn’t take much more research to remove all doubt.  The government was actually stealing Social Security money and using it for other purposes. 

On March 16, 2011, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) admitted that the government had stolen Social Security money during a Senate speech.  He said:

"Congresses under both Republican and Democrat control, both Republican and Democrat presidents, have stolen money from social security and spent it.  The money’s gone.  It’s been used for another purpose.”

Every member of Congress knows that what Senator Coburn said was absolutely true.  But very few average Americans have a clue that their Social Security contributions were stolen by the government and used for other purposes.  I have devoted the past 13 years of my life to trying to expose the fraud against overwhelming odds. The AARP and the NCPSSM have both marched in lockstep with the Social Security Administration in misleading the public about the true status of the Social Security trust fund.  The government has managed to keep the public from finding out about the theft for more than three decades.  Since neither the Republicans nor the Democrats want the truth reported, because they both are guilty of actions that they don’t want the news media to report.  The news media honors the government’s wishes to keep the story from being reported. 

My first book reporting this fraud, The Alleged Budget Surplus, Social Security and Voodoo Economics, was published in 2000, and I appeared on CNN, in September of that year, to discuss it.  I published three more books on Social Security in the years that followed.  But the most complete picture of what has happened is presented in my new Kindle book, THE IMPENDING SOCIAL SECURITY CRISIS: The Government’s Big Dirty Secret, which was just released  this month.  It is available at Amazon.com 

   http://amzn.com/B00CRTJM6K