Taking Stock by Malcolm Berko

Dear Mr. Berko: I heard you speak in Dallas recently and disagree with your answer to a question from the audience about the future of Social Security when you said that there was no such thing as a Social Security Trust Fund. I spoke with my congressman, who told me that the Social Security Trust Fund is real and is funded with $1.5 trillion of excess Social Security money and that we have nothing to worry about for the next 30 years, at which time we may have to raise contributions. So there is a real Social Security Trust Fund and it is funded with well over a trillion dollars and it's healthy and it's thriving. I think you owe your audience an apology and me, too, because you really frightened some of us. — F.G., Dallas

My Dear F.G.: I need to know if you have been in a coma during the past 30 years. Because it's hard for me to understand that you'd believe the word or promise of a member in Congress. Politicians, like baby diapers, must be changed often and for the same reason. You should know that the 535 representatives in the House and Senate are the wise, wonderful and caring men and women who gave the U.S. a $12 trillion deficit, an immigration disaster, a scandalous public education system, failure in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, high gas prices, a failed health care system, a crashing dollar, a screwed up tax system, a failed banking system, a failed economy and FEMA. And you should know that as a group, members of Congress (64 percent of whom are lawyers) have a higher percentage of felons, sexual deviants, bounced-check writers, bankruptcies, bribe takers, perjurers, divorces, drug possession and fraud, etc., than the general population. These 535 congresspeople have so successfully sucked the marrow from our bones that America has lost its spine. Congress is doing a yeoman's job as America's 21st-century Gestapo!

There is no such animal as a funded Social Security Trust Fund so your Scaramouch is telling you a bald-faced lie or is dumber than dung. The Trust Fund is merely artifice used by Congress to soothe the restive masses and keep us chained and docile. The so-called Social Security Trust Fund doesn't have a dime, a centime or a penning on deposit.

Rather, it's a chimera of specious IOUs to be redeemed for you by your children and grandchildren.

Here's how this trickery works: Employees pay Social Security taxes through their employers who send lump sum checks to the U.S. Treasury. The Treasury mails monthly benefit checks to retirees. The difference between the Social Security Taxes received by the Treasury and monthly Social Security benefits paid to retirees is given to the General Fund. Then it's used by Congress to pay for welfare, Pentagon packages, congressional pages, junkets, foreign aid, pork programs and numerous other special emoluments. The Treasury then conjures a special Social Security bond (also an accounting artifice), which is symbolically deposited in a fictional Social Security Trust Fund. The U.S. Treasury pays interest on these IOUs (nobody knows what that rate is), but interest is not paid in money; rather, it's paid in even more non-bogus Social Security bonds.

This is an accounting slight of hand (now you see it and you never will again) and nothing is deposited in a Social Security Trust Fund. So far, the cumulative total (if you believe you can trust government accounting) of these silly Social Security bonds is $1.51 trillion. And here's something on which to hang your hat. Did you know that the $1.51 trillion in Social Security bonds may not have the same claim on the U.S. Treasury as the real treasury bonds purchased by China, Japan, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, U.S. citizens or the various government bond mutual funds? A high-powered executive at one of the big-three rating services told me that these bonds are an unfunded, off-balance sheet liability and may be subordinate to claims of duly issued bonds that represent the congressionally approved national debt. And the Obama health care program, which will probably cost $3 trillion by 2020, will further impair the "collectivity" of those Social Security Bonds.

Several respected sources recently told me that Congress, in order to shore up the shortfall, wants to consider changes to Social Security eligibility based on personal need, which will be calculated, by your personal income and personal assets. And you can thank our dear 535 members of Congress who may eventually preclude 22 percent of Americans from collecting Social Security benefits.

Please address your financial questions to Malcolm Berko, P.O. Box 8303, Largo, FL 33775 or e-mail him at mjberko@yahoo.com. To find out more about Malcolm Berko and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM