President Clinton has jumped on the Social Security reform bandwagon. As a believer in government-sponsored pensions, he thinks he can fix the system. He is wrong. Social Security cannot be fixed. There is only one thing to do: junk it.
The financial problems with the system have been recited many times. Early in the next century, Social Security will be in deficit. Revenues will fall short of benefits. To keep it going, the government would have to raise taxes substantially, cut benefits, or both.
Why is the system in this mess? The primary reason is its pay-as-you-go financing. That is also the fraud at the heart of the system. It has aptly been compared to a pyramid scheme, which would land any private citizen in prison on bunko charges.
Even though Social Security never explicitly calls itself a pension or retirement insurance system, people have certainly been led to think that it is. Each pay period, workers are forced make what are called “contributions,” and when they retire, they are to receive benefits. The system is riddled with dishonesty. First of all, when the government forces a citizen to make a contribution, it’s a tax and nothing else. Second, the money is not put away or invested in order to earn interest and yield benefits for retirement later on. From the beginning, the money was used to pay benefits to current retirees. What seems to be savings is actually consumption. Third, there is no legal contract guaranteeing benefits.
The system over the years has taken in more than it has paid out. But the government “borrows” the surplus to spend on other things. That money is consumed too. The Social Security “trust fund” has nothing in it but bonds that need not be repaid and that can only be paid by additional taxation. This whole business is phony from top to bottom. How can the government borrow from itself? It simply moves money from one pocket to another. The various funds are accounting fictions.
When the surplus is gone, the fraud will be exposed. The problem with pay-as-you-go is demographics. As long as there were 42 workers per retired person, as the system had at one time, it could appear fiscally sound. But when it’s down to two or three workers per retired person, which is where it is going, things don’t look so good. The burden on those workers would have to be huge, or the benefits would have to be scaled back to stave off a tax revolt.
A publication put out recently by the Social Security Administration states, “Social Security is not intended to meet all your financial needs. When you retire, you will need other income, such as savings and a pension if you wish to maintain your current lifestyle.” That’s interesting, because if the government wasn’t taking all that money for Social Security (and other things), we would have more to save. Which brings up another fraudulent aspect of the system: the employer “contribution.” Even though your employer appears to pay half of the roughly 12 percent of your pay that is taken, he really doesn’t. You pay it. For the employer, it is part of your compensation package, a cost of hiring you, and thus money that would have been left in your pay envelope. The government makes it look like an employer contribution to keep you from getting mad.
Hardly anyone in power wants to acknowledge that the system is on the edge of a cliff. I think I know why. If Social Security, the crown jewel of the American welfare state, is seen to be rotted with fraud to the very core, what other conclusions might we Americans draw about our government? How else are we being bamboozled?
We can make a long-needed start toward throwing the welfare state off our backs by repealing Social Security and letting people look after their own retirement plans. Leave them the money they make, and they will be able to do so.