Convincing the rubes to do without what they already paid for.

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Lately, we have been hearing about public policy regarding Social Security from elements of the Republican Party, ranging from the loudmouthed new Tea Partying Senate candidate from Alaska, Joe Miller, through self-styled "Young Gun" of the Party of No, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI1), to the erstwhile Senator from Wyoming, and noted cranky old buzzard, Alan Simpson. Each of them is advocating a public policy on Social Security insurance that is simply a plan for the heist of this or any other century, resulting in the theft of two and a half trillion of American working people's dollars.

Miller, recently cited in a three-car crash that he initiated by rear ending another motorist, is speaking in a way that seems to guarantee that he will eagerly continue his recklessness in the Senate, particularly with regard to rear ending. Ryan is the Congressional Republican voodoo economic witch doctor and wunderkind that John Boehner has tasked with engendering the fictions required to flesh out the Republicans' three blank page budget and economic plan as well as a sitting member of the President's commission on deficit reduction. Ex-senator, Alan Simpson, is the Co-chairman of the President's "bipartisan" commission on deficit reduction, who recently envisioned the American People's perception of Social Security as a "milk cow with 300 million tits". It remains difficult for us to determine how Senator Simpson could have spent his entire life (his father was governor of Wyoming and a Senator from Wyoming) with his face inseparably affixed to his personal government teat while his foot was so firmly planted in his mouth, but I guess this guy is still pretty spry despite his advanced age, which, by all indications, has carried him into his dotage.

They all have been holding forth on how the Social Security system is "broke" with mere "I.O.U.'s" for a trust fund; and how the government has no Constitutional business in compelling young people who don't know better, and TEA Partiers who will never know better, to pay into a system that doesn't pay off as well as a Wall Street crap shoot would, under ideal conditions, as far as they know.

The corporate media has been nodding in uncritical agreement, in a way meant to communicate that this is a wonderful new idea to painlessly deal with the looming default of the Government of the United States due to the irresponsible run up of thirteen and a half trillion dollars in debt by an unassisted Barack Hussein Obama.

The supposed object of the commission's exercise is the reduction of deficits and the national debt, but the fact is that Social Security has never contributed one thin dime to either the deficit or the national debt. In fact, Social Security, funded by the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA), has never failed to leave a positive balance (surplus) in any year since its inception in 1937.

Really, the only flaw in the Republican argument is that it is a cynical fiction, stem to stern, beam to beam, and all the way down to Davy Jones' Locker, which by the way, is our destination if we take that ride on the Republican crazy train. No, that's not a mixed metaphor; they actually intend to drive the Train of State to the bottom of the ocean.

In the best traditions of twenty-first century Republican thought, our three counselors of the right have eschewed actual thought in favor of parroting a September 2004 Heritage Foundation "Executive Memorandum" authored by David C. John, entitled, "Misleading the Public: How the Social Security Trust Fund Really Works". Characteristically for Republicans, it is what comes before the colon that they got right. What comes after the colon is what one might expect to find following a Republican colon.

In any event, the contents of this "Executive Memorandum" match the reasoning of the Miller-Ryan-Simpson trio point for point except for the part about Social Security being unconstitutional. One must assume that David C. John couldn't bring himself to make that claim, understanding that Article I, Section 8, clause one of the Constitution is sufficient to refute such nonsense.

The Heritage "Memorandum" was produced in 2004 to provide then President, George W. Bush with the philosophical underpinning for his attempt to pull off the heist in February of 2005. It was then, in the week after his State of the Union speech that he said, "Some in our country think that Social Security is a trust fund; in other words, there's a pile of money being accumulated. That's just simply not true. The money -- payroll taxes going into the Social Security are spent. They're spent on benefits and they're spent on government programs. There is no trust." Again, with his last sentence he inadvertently made a true statement as he rationalized the default on what, at that time, was just under two trillion dollars in special Treasury Bonds. Does it sound familiar?

The response from former Rep. Bill Archer was, "If one believes that the trust fund assets are worthless, Americans who have bought EE Savings Bonds should go home and burn them because they're worthless because the money has already been spent."

A sensible American public left the Bush administration with the impression that, if Dubya actually pulled it off, the next time a Republican could be elected dog catcher, would simply be an excuse to set the dogs on him. That's when they decided to table the measure for a rainier day. The effort turned out to be no more than an exercise in casing the joint.

Actually, the Social Security System should have a trust fund. During the Reagan administration, concerns grew that the system could not be funded by a growing number of workers paying in when the Baby Boomers started to retire. A commission appointed at that time decided that the Baby Boomers would have to be responsible for funding a good deal of the benefits that they themselves would be collecting. This was accomplished by a sharp series of increases in the payroll tax that led to larger and larger surpluses that the Reagan administration immediately began to misappropriate by spending the surplus to disguise their own huge deficits. They kept the accounting straight by replacing the "borrowed" cash with special bonds, debt instruments that could only be used in the Social Security Trust Fund, and could not be traded for any other government debt instrument, but nevertheless backed by the full faith and credit of the Government of the United States.

You must be familiar with such a strategy. It is called "passing debt on to our grandchildren." You would think that Republicans should be able to speak authoritatively on the subject, since they invented it.

With the inconvertibility of these bonds, they cannot reduce the annual budget deficit; they can only be defaulted upon to reduce the national debt by that 2.6 trillion dollars. Then the Republicans will take credit for the reduction in the national debt with the money that they have stolen. It's like a bank robber expecting to be paid for his effort in tidying up the vault that they just emptied.

The looting continued through the Bush 41 administration and the Clinton administration, whose fabled surpluses could not have been claimed without support from redirected Social Security money. Bush 43, accepted access to these funds as he did everything else that was handed to him throughout his life, and still ran up record deficits while seizing Social Security funds and carrying the wars off the books to pretend that the situation wasn't so bad.

That's when, despite Dick Cheney's claim that deficits don't matter, someone started to wonder where they were going to get two trillion dollars to fund those debt obligations to date. The answer that seemed sensible to Republicans was, "Why should we have to raise taxes to pay them off at all?"

The Republican noise machine kicked into coarse ground mode as Bush and Cheney were both citing deficits of ten to eleven trillion dollars in the Social Security Trust Fund if the bones weren't thrown to Wall Street. Respecting Republican bylaws as they did, they were leaving the American People with a carefully groomed false impression. They assumed an infinite time horizon, where in truth, the deficit, if nothing is done, would be about $3.7 trillion by 2080.

The idea pushed by the Bush administration and their allies at the Heritage Foundation became that if there are no Social Security benefit recipients, there is no reason to pay off Social Security debt. So let's get the rubes to agree to do without what they have already paid for. If we play our cards right, we can keep collecting the payroll taxes and turn them over to our buddies on Wall Street. Does it begin to sound yet more familiar?

I heard a TEA Party guest speaker the other day, a financial advisor, no less, who was pushing the talking point that Social Security cannot possibly match the return on investment that the stock market could over the same period of time. I agreed with him that this was true as a generalization, but what about those poor souls who may have been retiring on September 14, 2001 or during the week of Wall Street's dramatically engineered collapse in 2008?

His disconnected response was that the market always recovers and grows over time. I pointed out that the souls in question did not have that time available, and that "expert recommendation and past performance are no indication of future results." His response was, "How many times have I heard that before?" as he moved quickly to other irrelevancies.

The truth is that investments in Wall Street financial instruments would lead to Social Insecurity.

In 2006, total income from payroll taxes and interest to the Social Security Trust

Funds came to around 744.8 billion dollars while outlays were around 555.4 billion dollars. This yielded a surplus of about 35% for the year. At the end of June, 2010 the Trust Funds' total surplus was $2,604 billion ($2.6 trillion), most of it in the form of the special Treasury Bonds.

This is the target that Ryan, Simpson, and Miller and their confederates are salivating over, and if they are successful in the heist, it would be no less theft than any other larceny from a lowly jack roller in an alley to the Great Train Robbery. The only significant difference would be that of scale, with this theft dwarfing its precedents.

The power to enable or deny this crime rests with We the People, depending on what we do with our franchise this November 2. Will we empower these con men, to our great disadvantage? Or will we assert that what is ours is not theirs to be used against us as they enrich themselves by converting it into SCROTUS sanctioned corporate "political speech"?

I wish I could claim this as an insight that was uniquely my own, but it isn't, and it isn't even a recently evolved insight. For proof of that, see Thom Hartmann's 2006 article on OpEdNews regarding the earlier attempt at the theft. You may find it here:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/2/opedne_thom_har_061022_the_truth_about_the_.htm

You may also check out these links:

http://www.socialsecurity.gov/history/trustfunds.html

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/ProgData/assets.html

http://www.heritage.org/research/socialsecurity/em940.cfm

Authors Bio:
I am a lifelong resident of the Chicago suburbs, with a several year hiatus to serve in the Navy when my Vietnam era draft notice turned up. I had been told that guys with last names like mine were among the preferred cannon fodder in the Army, so the additional time required for service in the Navy seemed well worthwhile.

After military service, I worked variously in petroleum refining, for myself as an architectural illustrator just in time for electronic media to displace the ink and watercolor images that were my specialty, and doing electronic technical drawing.

To more important issues, I married lucky, which is to say once and forever, and after thirty years still marvel that she keeps me around. We have two children, a daughter with a daughter of her own, and a son who is just coming into his majority.

My wife did tire of my shouting at the television set and suggested that if I feel so strongly about politics, I should be involved. That is when I started a prolific run of commentary on this site interspersed with a few articles, and joined my local Democratic Party organization. To my wife's chagrin, I still shout at the television set.

I believe that the liberal values I hold are the result of a proper upbringing, and those values are simply what my mother, like most mothers, taught to their children. Among those values was a love of country and an admonishment to stand up for those who couldn't stand up for themselves. I still hold the part of my military oath to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic", to be sacred.

I keep the Jr. in my name to spare my father, whom I am fortunate enough to still have in this world, from being misidentified as responsible for my rants.