By Al Duncan
Social Security is Bankrupt.
The federal government has spent the retirement funds of an entire generation, about $2.5 trillion and the Treasury Department has issued IOUs; government special-interest-earning bonds payable only to the Social Security Administration according to CBS News Politics, March 16.
The nation”s 78 million baby boomers have reached retirement age. And this year, the Social Security retirement program will pay out $29 billion more in benefits than it collects in taxes.
Medicare is Bankrupt.
The Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is projected to start running deficits in 2010. According to the annual report released May 2009, the Medicare trust fund will be depleted by 2018, two years sooner than predicted a year ago and 12 years sooner than anticipated in 2001.
Politicians are in dire need of a new, constant money source.
Aug. 13, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M, proposed the 2010 Automatic IRA Act. Along with the health care reform, the next step in total nationalization of health care is the private retirement system. More than $15 trillion is sitting in tax-favored retirement plans. Retirement savings make up 35 percent of all private assets. The new bill will expand federal control and redirect the contributions currently going into quasi-private programs into the bankrupt coffers of the politicians. I think this is a government takeover of the private retirement system and if enacted the bill could affect half of the country”s working population.
Columnist Ron Holland isn”t new to this government move to raid private retirement funds. Holland wrote two books to warn the public, “The Threat of the Private Retirement System,” 1983, and “Escape the Pension Trap,” 1994. In his recent article, “The New Auto IRA Is Just Highway Robbery,” we”re warned again, “Ultimately, nationalizing health care and private retirement creates a new government revenue stream under a nationalized government program that targets successful, productive Americans who make good annual incomes or who have built up substantial retirement benefits in qualified plans.” Holland then adds another admonition, “And don”t think a GOP victory in the fall elections or 2012 will safeguard your retirement assets, as our politicians” need for new wealth is a bipartisan effort by both political parties.
“Economic, political and foreign policy crises, almost always mold public opinion behind the government,” Holland states. “This was demonstrated in the Wall Street bailout when the word ?depression” was used in every government and political announcement until the bailout funds were secured, then the word “recovery” became the ?word of the day.” A plan this radical cannot just slip through Congress, it will take a first-class national crisis.”
Molly Brogan, vice president of public affairs for the National Small Business Association (NSBA), represents more than 150,000 members. In a NSBA survey of 450 small business owners, revenue declined 64 percent in the past 12 months. Brogan expresses concern in an e-mailed statement, “With small businesses struggling to stay afloat, we oppose mandates that create a new administrative burden. I don”t know how certain small businesses, restaurants in particular, could comply without hiring a payroll company”
“What I worry about is that retail brokers and advisers, such as Goldman Sachs, will own that market,” Matthew Hutcheson, founder of Matthew Hutcheson LLC, an independent fiduciary firm, said.
The national debt just reached $13 trillion, or nearly $42,000 for every man, woman and child in the country, that”s if we exclude the trillions confiscated from FICA and Medicare, and the government guarantees such as Fannie May, Freddie Mac, pensions benefits, etc., of which some approximate to be $60 trillion. It took 180 years to accumulate $1 trillion of debt. Gross debt tripled from $260 billion in 1950 to $909 billion in 1980. During the Reagan and Bush, Sr. presidencies from 1980 to 1992 gross debt quadrupled, it increased from $5.6 trillion in January 2001 to $10.7 trillion by December 2008 under Bush, Jr. And under Obama, in just one year the debt has enlarged by $1.6 trillion, according to Capital Hill Blue, Aug. 26. It”s slightly less than 90 percent of annual gross domestic product. Every day government borrows approximately $5 billion, and Congress just approved for themselves another $4.1 trillion spending increase for the next 33 months; on top of the $1.6 trillion they”ve spent this year.
Public leaders brought us from the greatest nation ever to exist, to the greatest debtor-nation ever to exist. We”re at the point of no return; they can”t meet their obligation to pay the interest on our debt. This sedition by our political leaders has reduced the United States to a socialist, third-world nation. It is naive to think this happened by chance.
Al Duncan is a local author, businessman and Record-Bee columnist. He can be contacted at alduncan@pacific.net.
