28 replies to this topic

[thefirstimmortal]

Have I mentioned that government doesn’t work?


In several posts I’ve pointed out that government never lives up to its promises, giving us only inefficiency, injustice, waste, and loss of liberty.

Occasionally, someone counters by pointing to a government program he thinks has achieved great good for America. Here I’ll touch on three of the most popular examples I’ve heard, federal disaster relief, the federal highway system, and the space program.

[thefirstimmortal]

It makes little sense for the people of Missouri to pay to rebuild a town in Florida after a hurricane, and then shortly thereafter have the people of Florida pay to rebuild a flooded town in Missouri. In both cases, the money passes through Washington, D.C., where the bureaucracy takes an enormous cut and adds nothing.

But the added expense of the federal government’s involvement is only part of the problem. Honing in on disaster relief gives the politicians another opportunity to distribute pork to politically influential groups.

For example, in 1997 the Red River flooded parts of North Dakota and Minnesota. No politician could be so heartless as to refuse to help. Concerned that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) didn’t have enough money to bail out the residents, Congress passed “The Emergency Supplemental Appropriations” bill.

Here are some of the “emergency” items funded, mandated, or regulated in this bill, all prompted by the need for relief from the Red River flood:

The “peacekeeping” effort in Bosnia.
Loans and grants for the College Station area of Pulaski County, Arkansas.
Collection and dissemination of statistics on cheese manufacturing in the United States.
Countering terrorism at the 2002 Winter Olympic games.
Handling marine mammals trapped in fishing equipment.
Foreign aid for Ukraine.
Repairs of concession facilities at Yosemite National Park.
Importation of polar bear parts from Canada.
“For payment to Marissa, Sonya, and Frank (III) Tejeda, children of Frank Tejeda, late a Representative from the
State of Texas, $133,600.”
Raising the limits on highway grants by $694 million.
Fixing an error in the Department of Transportation and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 1997, which mistakenly appropriated $661 million instead of $661 thousand. (Close enough for government work?)
Reimbursing the state of Colorado and the City and County of Denver for security arrangements at the
Denver Summit of Eight.
$16 million for a counter-terrorist Automated Targeting System.
Construction of a courthouse in Montgomery, Alabama.
An extra $928 million for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
$500,000 for a parking garage and $500,000 to restore the Paramount Theater, both in Ashland, Kentucky.
A new National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education.
Exceptions to the Truth in Lending Act and the Endangered Species Act.
Food stamps for people otherwise made ineligible by the latest welfare reform act.
Handling appropriations if there’s another government shutdown.
Prohibition on funding national reading and mathematics testing for school children.
Transferring $2 million from FEMA to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
$2 million for the establishment of a Law Enforcement Commission.
Leasing a building in Lexington, Kentucky.
Prohibition on spending funds to study the medicinal use of marijuana.

Oh yeah, the bill covered virtually everything under the sun except relief for the flood victims.

[thefirstimmortal]

Symbolism is everything. The President tours a disaster area and promises quick relief. In fact, the money may never arrive.

And when it does, it is seldom quick, usually arriving long after the Red Cross has packed up and headed for the next disaster. But who’s counting? It’s not the money that matters, it’s not even the thought that matters. It’s the symbolic gesture that gets votes. And a politician can make the gesture knowing neither the press nor the opposition party will ever hold him accountable later for his empty promises.

On the other hand, anyone voting against “The Emergency Supplemental Appropriations” bill of 1997 will be made to seem heartless, even though the bill is merely a cover by which the politicians can distribute more of your money to influential companies, agencies, and individuals.

This is what happens when you allow the federal government to intrude in areas where it has no Constitutional authority. Obviously, each state would be much better off if it were responsible only for its own problems. Since it is the Red Cross and other private agencies that provide immediate, real relief to those in need, nothing will be lost by ending the public relations posturing of federal politicians.

[thefirstimmortal]

The Interstate Highway System is held up as a great acomplishment of the federal government. Look at those beautiful 4-lane, 6-lane, and 8-lane highways. Aren’t you glad the federal government builds them?

Well, actually, the federal government doesn’t build them. Interstate highways are built by state governments, the same agencies that build the state highways. The only difference is that the money for a federal highway makes a round-trip to Washington, while money for a state highway doesn’t.

Of course, when the federal government pays for a highway, less money comes back from Washington than was sent there. Highway expert John Semmens has estimated that federal funding of highways has increased administrative expenses from the 7% of costs that prevailed in the 1950s (before the Interstate Highway System was begun) to about 20% today. That means we pay about 13% extra for a highway just to call it an Interstate.

[thefirstimmortal]

Many governments around the world have recognized that government roads are too expensive, and they have begun relying on private companies to build, own, and operate major toll roads. A private company acquires the rights to the necessary land (usually by securing options until all the necessary land has been tied up) and builds the road.

Highway consultant Peter Samuel has estimated that the cost of building private highways is roughly half the cost incurred by government. Some specific examples, such as comparing the private Melbourne CityLink in Australia to the similar government-built Boston Central Artery Tunnel project show private costs as low as one third of government costs.

Private roads also are more convenient. Companies are experimenting with new ways to collect tolls without slowing traffic. For example, a customer can attach a device to his car bumper that will send a signal to a toll sensor, which registers road usage and bills the customer by mail.

In addition, lower fares for off-peak hours help to draw traffic away from peak hours. Traffic slowdowns hurt profits, so private companies have a strong incentive to eliminate them, while government road administrators use slowdowns to lobby for bigger budgets.

[thefirstimmortal]

Some people feel that highway programs are a model of how government should work. The highways are financed out of gasoline taxes, which are paid for only by those who benefit from highways.

But that isn’t the way it works. Only about 70% of your gasoline tax money goes to build and maintain highways. The rest goes to boondoggles that reward influential politicians and well-connected businessmen.

“Your highway dollars at work” means that they have been used to pay for, among other spectacular failures, a multi-billion.. dollar subway system in Los Angeles that Californians laugh at, a new multi-billion-dollar airport in Denver that no one but the mayor wanted, a $2.5 billion Miami subway system that doesn’t work, and the Detroit People Mover, a trolley system that hardly anyone uses because it goes hardly anywhere.

Let the federal government start anything, and it won’t stop where you think it should. It is the nature of government to follow each boondoggle with something more expensive.

[thefirstimmortal]

Some people think the federal government has to build inter-state highways in order to have roads that go from state to state, and roads that go all the way across the country But why? Before the Interstate Highway System was built, states built highways that crossed the entire country.

Too often the federal government’s “interstate” highways aren’t even interstate. For example, U.S. Highway 880 travels a grand total of 36 miles near Oakland, California, and is about 150 miles from the nearest state line. There are many such inter-states throughout America. Why does the federal government finance “interstate” highways that don’t even cross state lines?

[thefirstimmortal]

When you turn something over to the government, it inevitably is reworked to suit those with the most political influence, in this case, the most powerful politicians in the House and Senate, who steer the federal highway projects to contractors and unions in their states.

The highway program also allows the federal politicians to dictate policies to state governments, such as mandatory seat-belt use, speed limits, and the legal drinking age, matters that the Constitution places off-limits for the federal government.

[thefirstimmortal]

Perhaps they are starry-eyed, but for some reason some people believe the space program is one of the federal government’s greatest hits.

They remember the remarkable moon landing in 1969 and assume that everything NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Agency) does must be equally impressive.

But the moon landing is yet to yield any tangible benefit to the taxpayers who paid for it. And the space program has consisted since then of an unbroken string of promises and failures.

For example, President Reagan proposed the space station in 1984. All sorts of achievements and benefits were promised for it.

But as of 2001, none of the promised benefits had been delivered.

The Space Station
Original Promise Result to date

Cost: $8 billion $100 billion spent so far

Completion : date:1992 Still not done; current
estimate is 2005

Parts completed 40 2

Missions completed 8 1

In 1972 and again in 1982, NASA made predictions about the space shuttle. Here is how well that program has turned out:

The Space Shuttle
Original Item Promise Result to date

Flights per year: 51 4 in 1999

Launch service
customers:

All government Government programs
& private customers only

Servicing of satellites:

Expected to be one Done by others because it
of main purposes took NASA too long to

Achievements
Learn how Discover cures Nothing
for diseases, find miracle
alloys, & lead to new products

[thefirstimmortal]

The last post did not enter the way I typed it in, but I think you get the point

[thefirstimmortal]

The space shuttle was supposed to provide great benefits to science and the American economy As Robert Oler, Richard Kolker, and Mark Whittington explain:

Some NASA officials even boast that for every dollar spent, nine or ten - some have even claimed fifteen - dollars go back to the federal treasury ... But after almost 20 years of flying the space shuttle, not a significant scientific or medical process has been discovered or perfected in space. No significant product of any kind has been produced in space.
Furthermore, the servicing of satellites, once the shuttle’s raison d’être, has been abandoned.

[thefirstimmortal]

In 1999 the $200 million Mars Climate Orbiter died because of “a navigation error”, which in fact occurred because NASA calculations had confused metric measurements with standard U.S. measurements.

In January 2000, NASA reported that it had lost the $165 million Polar Lander that was supposed to explore Mars. So NASA went back to the taxpayers’ trough to get new funding to look for the lost Lander.

[thefirstimmortal]

In the 1970s several private companies wanted to build their own rocket launchers and send satellites into space. But the government wouldn’t use their services. And by offering cheap, subsidized rates for launching satellites, the government effectively killed all private competition.

It took the Challenger crash to change the rules, reducing considerably the number of government launches. Now government agencies use private launch services, instead of driving them out of the market.

Most other laws that inhibited private development of space have been removed. And so markets are opening up for tourism in space, as well as private mapping of the moon and far-off planets. I have no doubt that there will be other markets that will spur private space development.

Beal Aerospace has invested $200 million in the building of a new rocket to launch satellites. This is a pittance compared to what a government launcher costs. When an enterprise seems too big for the private sector to handle, it’s often because we use government costs to gauge its size.

Unburden private companies from subsidized competition and they will provide the money to do what is truly worth doing. Usually they will succeed. But if a private company fails to deliver, it won’t cost the taxpayers anything.

[thefirstimmortal]

Mangala says that he is happy about all those fine taxes everyone pays for all the wonderful services that government provides. He feels that there are many fine government programs that have achieved a great deal.


I asked of anyone, give me an example of one great government program so we can examine it.

[Mind]

I want to say the judicial system is a good example of a government program working, but it really isn't a program, it is a duty of the government spelled out in the constitution. Even the judicial system seems to be getting out of control though....examples - the tobacco lawsuits, the asbestos lawsuits, the newest fast food lawsuits. In my view, too many judges are making law from the bench and juries are awarding much too extravagant punitive damages.

[bobdrake12]

I asked of anyone, give me an example of one great government program so we can examine it.

The First Immortal,

How about the Social Security "Trust Fund"?



bob

[thefirstimmortal]

Social Security is not your ordinary insurance program. It dispenses with such old-fashioned concepts as saving and wealth-building. There is no salesman to talk to. No long, com­plicated contract with fine print, and no actuarial tables to get in the way. No decisions for you to make. It operates on a very simple principle:

The politicians take your money from you and spend it as they please.

For all your working years, 15% of what you earn (up to $60,600 of earnings per year) goes to the politicians as Social Security tax. They might spend your money on other people’s retirements or use it to buy votes, build monuments to themselves, or prop up the Russian government for another half hour. But the one thing they’ll never do is put your money in an account with your name on it, where it can be invested and grow and build up for your retirement.

No matter how much you’ve paid into Social Security, the politicians have put nothing aside for your retirement. Every dol­lar they’ve taken from you has already been spent. Anything Social Security eventually pays you will be taken by force from the paychecks of younger people, probably, including your own children and grandchildren.

Of course, such a system is inherently unsound, robbing Peter to pay Paul, then robbing Patty to pay Peter, and then searching for someone to rob in order to pay Patty. Because the system is fueled by taxing and spending, rather than by saving and investing, keeping it going gets harder and harder.

So the politicians have to “save” Social Security every few years. They do this by changing the rules. The tax rate goes up. The amount of your wages subject to tax goes up. The retirement age goes up. And the benefit schedules change. If they keep “saving” Social Security this way, one day someone may have to pay 85% of his income in order to receive a pension of $100 a month when he retires at age 922.

In any event, keeping the program going is getting harder and harder as people stay alive longer and longer. And every advance in medical science makes the Social Security problem worse. Only for Social Security administrators would a cure for cancer be a catastrophe.

[thefirstimmortal]

Social Security isn’t unique. It’s a model of government in action taking from some, giving to others, and promising more to everyone.

To keep the game going, the politicians make more and more promises without knowing who’s going to pay for them. And so the liabilities mount up until some future Congress has to deal with the situation by raising taxes, by reneging on some of the promises, and by restricting your freedom even further.

Economists have estimated that a young person entering the workforce today will have to pay 70% of his lifetime income in taxes just to cover all the promises already made for Social Security and other government schemes. But how many people will show up for work if 70% of their earnings is taken from them? So eventually the government will be able to survive only by reducing drastically many of the “services” it has promised. One day your Social Security check will be cut. Or some banks will fail but the government insurance system won’t have the money to cover all the losses. Or you’ll get sick in your old age but Medicare will be so broke it can only hand you a booklet of first-aid tips from Dear Abby.

Most people know intuitively that the government won’t keep its promises, especially those for Social Security. In fact, one poll found that only 32% of all Americans who haven’t yet retired believe they will ever collect Social Security benefits. In the under, 30 age group, more believe in flying saucers than in the survival of Social Security. And, of course, their skepticism is well founded.

You can’t trust politicians with your health, or to make sure banks are safe, or to manage welfare, or to put your safety or financial future ahead of their own interests. So it should be obvious that you can’t trust politicians with your retirement money.

Turning anything over to politicians makes it a political issue to be decided in favor of whoever has the most political influence. And that will never be you or me.

[thefirstimmortal]

Social Security doesn’t invest your money, it spends it. So it will always be a poor alternative to the simplest system of sav­ing and investing. This makes the Social Security tax especially painful because you could do so much more with the 15% the politicians are taking from you.

If you pay money into a private retirement account, you have a guaranteed contract you can count on. The contract never changes without your permission, and no one can take anything away from you. And in addition to providing a retirement income for yourself, you accumulate capital you can pass on to your chil­dren.

Suppose you’re 25 years old today, starting out on a career. And suppose, instead of paying 15% to Social Security, you could keep that and save it on your own, perhaps doing nothing more sophisticated than keeping it in a bank savings account, earning yearly interest of only 5%. And, lastly, suppose your first year’s salary is $25,000, growing from there by 5% each year. When you retire, your savings would produce a monthly income of $4,510 (compared with Social Security’s maximum benefit of $1,433). In addition, you would leave an estate of over $1 million for your heirs, whereas Social Security gives you no estate at all.

Or, if you’d be happy with Social Security’s maximum benefit of $1,433, you could acquire that by saving only 5% of your income, rather than by pouring 15% of it into Social Security. And you’d still leave an estate of over $350,000 compared with $0 for Social Security.

[thefirstimmortal]

Politicians aren’t interested in plans to make your retire­ment secure through private savings, however. They want to keep you locked into the present system. “Saving Social Security” is a mantra for both Democrats and Republicans. To them, it means saving their control over your life.

No politician is suggesting you have the right as a free American to drop out of Social Security whenever you want. Or that you be allowed to control completely your own earnings or your own retirement. Or that Social Security should be operated like any prudent private insurance company, one that guaran­tees to meet its obligations by saving and investing the money it collects.
No chance. All the suggestions for saving Social Security are about gaining power and ducking blame, putting off the prob­lem, raising taxes, or giving the government more control and calling it reform.

Democratic proposals include having the Social Security Administration invest some of its tiny reserves in the stock mar­ket instead of keeping them all in U.S. government bonds, as is done now. This supposedly would increase the return and elim­inate the need to raise the Social Security tax. Just think, Al Gore might be your investment advisor.

Even if the politicians could invest sensibly in stocks, actual­ly producing more money, this would serve only to give them more money to squander. And they’d still be back every few years, pushing another tax increase to bail out a bankrupt sys­tem.

The Republicans, on the other hand, talk about “privatizing” Social Security. Does that mean the 15% they’ve been taking from you will be yours to keep and invest however you want? Not on your life. They have in mind letting you keep, maybe, 2% of the 15% they’ve been taking from you, just as serfs were allowed to keep a small portion of the food they produced for their masters.

Of course, you’ll have to invest that 2% in ways the govern­ment approves of which means dealing only with companies that have ingratiated themselves with the politicians. And the government still will take the other 13% of the Social Security tax and send it down that big rat hole in Washington.

Some Republican proposals promise to increase the 2% grad­ually until one day you’ll get to keep the entire 15%. When will that be? The foremost Republican plan estimates you’ll have complete control in 60 years. Just think: your great-great-grand­children might be completely free from the Social Security scheme. Except, of course, that plans to reduce government control
gradually are quickly discarded.

In 1981 Congress enacted a plan to reduce taxes over three years. In the second year they raised taxes, and did so again in the third year.

In 1997 Congress made a big show of putting “spending caps” into the federal budget, permanent limits on how much the government could spend on most items within the budget. The following year the politicians discarded the caps.

In 1999 the President and Congress noisily pledged to set aside any surplus receipts from the Social Security tax to pay for future Social Security benefits. Three months later, spending the surplus on the war in Yugoslavia seemed like a better idea.

A multi-year transition program is usually a lie and always a failure. It’s the diet you’ll start next month and the weeds you’ll
pull when the weather’s better. Even if the politicians stuck to such a plan for the full 60 years, why should we have to wait decades to be completely free of Social Security?

Long-term privatization programs in countries like Chile have had more success partly because a dictatorship isn’t subject to political pressure to abandon its plans.

[thefirstimmortal]

When it’s time to pay off on political promises, the money is almost never there. And if politicians can’t weasel out of a promise, they have only one way to pay for it: raise taxes. In fact, they’ve raised Social Security taxes 16 times already. That’s an average of once every four years since the program started in 1935.

Each payroll tax increase is touted as the final solution for Social Security, but it really is just one more in a continuing series. So if we let the politicians continue to control Social Security, the next tax increase is inevitable.

[thefirstimmortal]

Republican and Democratic politicians offer all kinds of rea­sons for hanging on to control over your retirement.
They say that some people don’t know how to invest prof­itably. But, once again, government breaks your legs and then claims that only it can provide the crutch. Saving for your retire­ment is difficult only because the politicians have made it that way.
If they didn’t tax interest earnings, and if their monetary policies didn’t create inflation, you could assure a comfortable retirement simply by putting 5% to 10% of your paycheck into a bank savings account or having your employer do it for you. Even if you know nothing about investing, you could easily take care of yourself if the politicians would simply leave you alone.

They claim also that government must run your retirement because some people are too irresponsible to plan ahead.
Of course, some people wouldn’t provide for their own retire­ment. But it is wrong to force everyone into a fraudulent system just because a few people won’t take responsibility. It’s like say­ivg that since not everyone can drive well, no one should be allowed to drive and we all have to ride in the government bus, even as it careens along the edge of a cliff.

Because government taxes away half our income, planning for retirement is difficult today. The obvious solution is to reduce taxes dramatically, end Social Security, and let you save the amount you think is right.

That was the system we had before Social Security was enacted. People saved for their own retirement. Those few people
who wound up with nothing were taken care of by private chari­ty; their retirement wasn’t as comfortable as that of more respon­sible people, but they lived as well as people who are wholly dependent on Social Security today.

[thefirstimmortal]

So long as Social Security remains in the politicians’ hands, it will be unsafe. We can’t leave our retirement money lying on the table, for them to grab and spend.

The only way to make Social Security safe is by getting the government out of it. And the only way to get government out of it is to do so now completely and forever.

Millions of Americans have paid into Social Security. But since the politicians have already spent that money, they now tax you to make good on what they promised to others.

That seems to leave only two alternatives: either (1) you con­tinue paying the tax collector for the retirement of senior citizens or (2) elderly people will lose their pensions.

Political methods always involve using force to take from one and give to another. So political methods can’t free you and other Americans from servitude to Social Security without impover­ishing those who are already dependent upon it.
But we don’t have to solve this problem with political methods.

[thefirstimmortal]

If you’re retired now or about to be, the present system makes you dependent on the politicians’ ability to take more and more money away from your children and grandchildren. No wonder you worry about your future.

In place of Social Security, you should have your own indi­vidual account with a private company that can guarantee to deliver a lifetime income to you without fail an income equal to what Social Security has promised.

The politicians should never be able to touch that account or reduce it or borrow from it for their pet programs. It should belong to you and you alone, just like your car or your clothes.

[thefirstimmortal]

It isn’t necessary to tax younger people to provide private accounts for each person on Social Security now. The federal government owns trillions of dollars worth of assets it doesn’t need and shouldn’t have. These include power companies, pipelines, idle military bases, business enterprises, over 400,000 buildings, oil and mineral rights, commodity reserves, and much more including 29% of all the land in the United States.

When the federal government is reduced to just its Constitutional functions, there will be no reason for it to contin­ue hoarding those assets. They can be sold to the public, putting them in the hands of people who will use them more responsibly and more productively. And the sales will generate the money to clean up the financial mess the politicians have made.

So that the market for these assets won’t be depressed, the sales should take place over a six-year period. I’d pre­fer that it be six days, but that would reduce the proceeds.

It is impossible to know in advance how much money the assets will bring because nothing like this has ever been done before. Estimates of the assets’ market value have ranged from $5 trillion to $50 trillion. But if selling the assets brings even $12 trillion, it would solve two thorny problems.

First, the initial proceeds should be used to buy private retirement accounts for everyone now on Social Security life­time annuities from stable insurance companies that have never broken their promises. The government will have no further Social Security liabili­ty to anyone. No retiree will be left in the lurch or dependent on the solvency of Social Security. And neither you nor your children will ever again have to pay the 15% Social Security tax. Anyone between age 50 and retirement can receive an annu­ity that will begin paying out at age 65. Anyone under 50 will save more from the elimination of the Social Security tax than he gives up in future Social Security benefits.

Second, the remaining proceeds from the asset sales will pay off the entire accumulated federal debt. You, your children, and your grandchildren will be free of the enormous burden of debt the politicians have piled on you. The government’s yearly interest costs will be reduced to zero.

[thefirstimmortal]

It's the only plan that takes Social Security completely away from the politicians and gives you control over your own money.
It’s the only way your retirement, that of your parents and grand-parents, and that of your children and grandchildren, will finally be secure.

It’s the only solution worthy of a free country.

[bobdrake12]

Politicians aren’t interested in plans to make your retire­ment secure through private savings, however. They want to keep you locked into the present system. “Saving Social Security” is a mantra for both Democrats and Republicans. To them, it means saving their control over your life.

The First Immortal,

Probably the first "reform" for social security is to see that legistlation is inacted to insure that those in Congress as well as other government workers (e.g. postal employees) are forced into this ponzi scheme the same way as the rest of us are.

bob

http://www.capmag.co...ticle.asp?ID=93

End the Fraudulent Social Security Program Now (excerpts)

by Jack Letourneau (April 14, 1999)

Summary: The U.S. government took Ponzi’s plan, magnified it, and backed it with the muscle of law: just as Ponzi paid old investors with the money coming from new investors, the government pays off retired workers with money taxed from young workers.

As a Ponzi scheme, Social Security cannot last forever. When it finally does self-destruct, all the money paid in taxes will be lost. Around 2010, the Baby Boom generation will begin to retire and the working population will be shrinking. The program will be in the red by 2025, still supporting millions of boomers and putting an intolerable strain on those of us who are still working. People starting their careers now have no hope of collecting the money they will pay in Social Security taxes. The program will accumulate a deficit of $3.1 trillion over the following seventy years, crashing under the weight of its own fraudulent nature. Baby boomers’ children will then be cut off from their past “contributions” to the program. This program would be contemptible if it was privately run and participation was voluntary. How much worse is it, then, as a government project in which tax money is collected under threat of force?

More importantly, as a Ponzi scheme forced upon the people it defrauds, Social Security violates every American’s property rights. Tax payment is certainly not optional; a jail sentence is the stick the government wields to force remittance from the person refusing to surrender his money to the income tax collector. This is an initiation of force, a fact that cannot be washed away regardless of what the government does with the stolen money. A thug who mugs people in the park but then gives his loot to the poor is still a thief violating people’s rights. No matter what sound bites or false claims the government uses to rationalize Social Security, its essential nature remains unchanged. It is a fraudulent Ponzi scheme that is coercively imposed on all of its victims.

Social Security has been a leech on the wallets of Americans for over sixty years. As citizens of the freest nation on Earth, we should be outraged that we have been defrauded for so long. To defend the freedoms guaranteed to us by the Founding Fathers, we must raise our voices to those who lead us: “End Social Security now!”

[thefirstimmortal]

....And where is Mangala now, and why is he not defending all these great services that he feels we should all be forced to participate in?

[bobdrake12]

why is he not defending all these great services that he feels we should all be forced to participate in?

The First Immortal,

The system sometimes represents lies as the truth such as that there is a Santa and "things go better with Coke".

The system tells people what they want to hear and sells it in a very convincing manner.

http://images.google...wb/santacok.jpg

The fact is that Congress isn't under Social Security; thus, doesn't believe in the Social Security ponzi scheme any more than you or I do.

http://images.google...1/09/condit.jpg

bob