georgeob1 wrote:
I think the historical facts suggest you are both wrong. The rhetoric and nomenclature surrounding the Social Security program was certainly designed to create the illusion that is was a kind of self-funding insurance scheme. However the actual mechanisms built into the law from the start revealed it to be merely a wealth transfer scheme, with wealth passing from the ranks of the currently employed to the retired and disabled. The "trust Fund" was designed to be completely accessable to the treasury through the issue of government bonds. This was not a deceptive practice that silently grew up after the system was enacted: it was there from the start.
I think the whole thing was deception from Day 1. Perception is 99% reality, and it was what the people were led to believe that is important, not what is hidden in some obscure federal code that nobody reads. Another thing, social security was meant to be a supplemental retirement fund, but many people somehow have come to believe it to be a full retirement fund, and when the amounts are insufficient, they complain about the government shorting them the money and not taxing the rich enough to support their chosen lifestyle when they reach 65. Many of those same people are without another dime to their name at 65 and some politicians do nothing to dispel people's expectations of such a rosy future with social security, when it was never meant to be a full retirement program.
Also, if retirement trust fund managers in the private sector would return the same kinds of low returns on the citizens money as the federal government does, they would at the very least been fired a long time ago and somebody competent and honest would have been hired. The whole thing is a scheme that is based on more than one shell game or dishonesty. For one, they tax half of it from employees and half from employers, which does nothing but increase paperwork and cost in an effort to make it look like the bite is only half of what it really is. Of course the self employed pay the entire percentage, but employees pay the full amount whether they know it or not, because otherwise the employer could be paying them the money instead.
P.S. Government employees should be made to be social security participants and taste their own medicine instead of their own cushy retirement funds. After all, people in the private sector may have their own funds and are still made to pay social security. That is another deception and fraud perpetrated on the American people.
