Social Security: They Want to
Raid it...Again!
Hello, Americans. Yes, the Republican Party wants to raid—once again—Social Security as a condition for raising the US debt limit caused by the Trump Administration’s huge tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy. It is part of a crazy upside-down world created by the lunatic fringe on the right. Up is down, the clouds are made of cotton candy, and the top 10 percent of wealth holders with $135 trillion of wealth really need a lot more wealth. And that wealth must come from you and me (the other 90 percent) even though we only hold $15 trillion of it. For you math enthusiasts, that is a 100 to 1 ratio. With the power to make laws, who can stop them? Put another way, elections have consequences.
That is the current state of lunacy in the US House of Representatives thanks to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California and his coterie of like-minded thieves.
As background, Social Security is a pay-as-you-go program funded by the payroll tax by today’s workers for today’s retirees. When today’s workers retire it will be funded by the new population of workers. So the younger generation pays for the older generation in a continuing stream of money in, and money out. It is not a Ponzi scheme. No Ponzi scheme in human history has ever lasted 88 years, or produced $2.7 trillion more than it paid out.
Now about that $2.7 trillion in surplus money: It is nowhere to be found. It went to bail out lots of other programs that were running deficits. In its place the US Treasury now holds “special bonds” to be paid at some future day, so they say. In reality, it is money lost forever, never to be repaid, and all smart politicians know it. So what does the Republican Party want to do about it? They want to cut more benefits until Social Security is just a memory that once kept older residents and the disabled alive.
Apparently there is no law that forbids the Treasury from taking money from one program and giving it to others. And there is no law against creating “special bonds” that will never be paid. Well, according to Paul Krugman (2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics), there is nothing to stop the Treasury from stamping $10 trillion worth of coins that are legal tender. Why not? That would take care of the current and all future debt ceilings when any nincompoop masquerading as a representative of the people of the United States believes he or she can hold our economy hostage until their equally lame demands are met.
Print that coin, President Joe. Print that coin! I’ll take the rap.
