Under the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, Congress passed the Social Security Act (SSA) on August 14, 1935. This act established an insurance program for all workers under the age of 65 in commerce and industry (except railroad employees). The Federal Insurance Contribution Act (FICA) provided for retirement, disability, survivorship, and death by withholding funds from employees’ pay. In the succeeding years many amendments were added to SSA, some of which eventually made almost all Americans eligible. In 1977, the payroll tax was raised from 2% to 6.15%.  In 1950 the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) was made part of the program.

The 1983 amendment made Social Security a gigantic Ponzi scheme because the spendthrift members of Congress, in their insatiable search for taxpayer’s money to get re-elected, raided the Social Security Trust. The Social Security Ponzi scheme involves trillions of dollars making Bernie Madoff’s scam seem like he was stealing from a child’s piggy bank. This amendment allowed Congress to remove the excess money in the Social Security Trust Fund and replace it with non-marketable Treasury Notes guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. To further their insidious subterfuge, they made this indebtedness to Social Security and Medicare “off budget” to disguise the actual amount of the federal debt by making it look smaller - shades of the Enron accounting scandal. The unrepentant members of Congress even had the nerve to tax retirees’ Social Security income, undeserved, shameful double taxation.

Initially, like a Ponzi scam, Social Security had many more workers contributing to the insurance fund than there were retired individuals, creating large surpluses. Slowly, the demographics and the extension of life expectancy have reduced the proportion of contributors to retirees. We’re approaching the time when first Medicare and then Social Security will be paying out more money than is collected. Congress will lower the amounts paid out to retirees and raise the percentage of withdrawal of employees’ pay to compensate for these shortfalls. The result will be that individuals in the work force today, upon retirement, will receive less money than they contributed. Social Security isn’t insurance, it is another devious tax imposed by career Congressmen/women. The tragic irony of this debacle is if the Social Security trust fund hadn’t been replaced with paper, Treasury Notes, by Congress, the invested trillions of dollars of surplus in sixteen years would have earned enough money for the program to be fiscally sound with the ability to compensate for the imbalance of payouts far into the future.

Apathetic Americans meekly accept these scandalous transgressions by incumbent Republican and Democratic members of Congress and pay for the consequences. Our complacency encourages these career politicians to adopt even more grandiose schemes to produce additional money for their nefarious purposes. The next artifice is the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade boondoggle which will raise trillions of dollars for Congress to misuse. It is time to lock the barn door even though the horses have been stolen, otherwise the barn will be stolen.

These so called public servants are ruining our country. They should be put in jail or impeached; they certainly don’t deserve to be re-elected.