So if Bernie Madoff Got 125 Years for His $50 Billion Ponzi Scheme…

What sort of sentence does every Member of Congress and the Social Security Trustee Board deserve for squandering at least $1 trillion in so-called “surplus’ trust funds in Social Security since 1983?

2500 years in prison? (you do the math)

‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we submit to you that the fraud and financial malfeasance perpetrated upon you and this great Republic of ours by everyone in authority over the administration of the Social Security system since its inception is far, far greater than anything Mr. Bernard Madoff ever did or contemplated doing to his investors!”

Here are some other disturbing truths we ‘find to be self-evident’ about the entire Social Security system; perhaps we should emulate Martin Luther and post them as the ‘99 Theses’ on the front door of Congress:

1. Social Security was set up as a ‘temporary’ income replacement program in the Great Depression.
2. Social Security was never intended to be a permanent retirement system for every aging American
3. We (our forefathers, mothers and grandparents who came before us) created a ‘social safety net’ to help poor, indigent or physically disabled fellow Americans meet their needs in their dotage, and we have absolutely no problem with that noble goal.
   
4. Those founders never intended to create a federally-mandated transfer program-shifting from those currently working to subsidize the incomes of those who are retired.
   
5. If we really want a retirement program, we should stop trying to force a square peg of a welfare program into the round hole of a retirement program and create a new program that will meet the actuarial needs of every American because it is based on sound and true financial investing principles.
   
6. And the first step is to expose the myth that the current Social Security system is a ‘trust fund’ when it is not. The so-called “trust fund” is a federal accounting gimmick that depends on future taxpayers redeeming the IOUs that have been issued.
   

There are only two ways to redeem those IOUs; raise taxes or divert funds from all other federal spending into retirement programs as we shall soon see in subsequent posts.