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Tuesday, 21 August 2007 |
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Social Security is a federally run ponzi scheme signed into law by FDR and originally ruled to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The court saw it as illegal at first, until FDR threatened to appoint five additional members to the bench knowing he could get his Democratically-controlled congress to approve the appointments. The constitution does not specifically state how many justices there should be, so the argument was made that the president's authority to appoint was not limited to a membership quota.
The basic economic mechanism of Social Security is that the government collects a percentage of every working individual's check to subsidize a public retirement account. The original intent was to supplement existing pensions that had been devalued due to depression-era inflation. At the time Social Security was created, there were fifteen tax payers for every retiree and the system was set up to pay out so long as this demographic remaind - hence, a 'pyramid or ponzi scheme.'
Today, the federal government collects 13 percent of the first $90,000 income earned - a regressive tax that takes its highest percentage from the people who earn the least - to pay a benefit for people eligible to receive funds.
Washington D.C. has typically drawn a social security surplus because of the ratio of workers and beneficiaries in the tax and spend pyramid. And not your typical surplus: this amount of money in the annual surpluses combined would be valued at trillions of dollars when adjusted for average stock-market investment rates. Unfortunately, the surplus was not saved and invested but rather spent out of the government's annual operating budgets. Rather than a sound investment in America's future, Social Security is an unfunded promise by a government trillions of dollars in debt. Many projects say that in twenty years there will be two workers to every one recipient. In recent years, politicians have advised the American public not to count on social security as a sole means for retirement - this advisory is especially true for younger workers. Contribute your views and opinions on the Politics Forums
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 09 April 2008 )
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