Paul Mulshine explains the similarity between the Ponzi investment rip off and the Government’s Social Security racket.
I think it is fair to say that 2008 has been the worst year in the history of the Republican Party. Every conservative columnist in America has weighed in with a theory on how to rescue the right. So here’s mine: Stop treating the young people of America the way Bernie Madoff treated his investors.
A lot of people have been comparing the Ponzi scheme allegedly run by Madoff to the Ponzi scheme run by the U.S. government, also known as Social Security.
That’s entirely unfair.
To Madoff.
From what I can gather, Madoff at least made an attempt to invest the money he got from early investors to give them the returns he promised. Those investments failed to bring in enough money and the scheme was doomed to fail sooner or later. But if Madoff had been a more brilliant investor, it might have worked.
The federal government, on the other hand, never tried to make the Social Security system work. The feds didn’t invest the money in the market. They took the money that we gave them and lent it to themselves, promising themselves interest. To be paid by themselves.
This scheme is even more crooked than Madoff’s. But try and explain that to adults, especially Baby Boomers. The math is complicated, but the typical boomer seems to understand that he or she is on the winning side of the curve in this scheme. We will get a good return on our Social Security payments and a fantastic return on our payments into Medicare.
……The only major-party presidential candidate who ever addressed this issue honestly was Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. He wanted to make Social Security voluntary and he was opposed to Medicare, which was then in the planning stages.
Goldwater lost in a landslide. It’s not hard to see why. Everyone who voted in that election was on the winning side of the Ponzi scheme.
……As for the Republicans, they treated Texas congressman Ron Paul as a pariah in the presidential primaries for reviving the Goldwater worldview.
The rest is here: http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2008/12/the_ponzi_scheme_that_baby_boo.html
Just two points of contention:
If Ron Paul was as close to Goldwater’s thinking as Mulshine implies, he would not have been viewed as a pariah. Paul is more of a ‘troofer’ wackjob than anything else.
The AARP and the Democratic senior citizen constituency, have seen to it that no one will ever have the opportunity to invest or save the amount of money we are being forced to pay, into the train wreck known as Social Security.