12 thoughts on “Here we go”

1. “If there is any kind of justice, a whole bunch of Congresscritters are now — and will be — spending the next eternity roasting in hell.”

   I really hope you aren’t surprised by this.

2. Of course if I were to run a similar scheme, Mr. Dog here would clap me into gaol for mail fraud and armed robbery…

   (Of course, I’d never do such a thing. Honest brigandry is more to my tastes!)

3. I’d rather deal with an honest thief than a…

   Wait a sec…

   I was about to say “dishonest politician”, but I’d be repeating myself…

4. One minor point:

   I don’t know the details (I’m sure some other poster will), but the Supreme Court has ruled that Social Security tax money may NOT be put aside; it must be put into the general fund and spent.

   Think about what this means; for the Supreme Court to have come into it at all, some previous Congress must have TRIED to put the money aside, and somebody went to court to prevent it.

   OK, subsequent Congresses could have tried to re-work the Law, and didn’t. To my mind, though, the deepest pit of hell is reserve for the swine who brought suit in the first place.

5. God willing, I plan to emulate my dear grandfather and work till I am 90+ Anyway since the congresscritters have royally screwed things up so much, I will probably have no choice.

   The Lord only knows how deep is the contempt in which I hold most of those idiots.

6. “Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

   “Washington is a stud farm for every jackass in the country.”

   “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.”
   -Mark Twain

7. The ‘General Fund’ is a total scam. We live in a town that is so broke and in debt it’s pitiful, and not one city department has a separate account so that money can be traced. The fire department, which does have a separate account, found when they needed a new tanker truck, that the city’s matching funds in escrow had been ‘borrowed.’ Trouble of it is, none of these borrowings is ever repaid. But we have enough money, it seems, to make city functions that used to be open, an invitation-only ‘do now.
   My wish for the Congresscritters is that they have to get along for the rest of their lives on my monthly income: $1078.00
   Try it, you’ll LIKE it!
   LawMom

8. The joys of governmental accounting. The general fund hides a multitude of sins, and guarantees no given expense can really be traced back to the resposible department.

   Fundraising gets rather…creative…as well under fund accounting.

   If LawMom gave $100 to be used toward the purchase of a new fire tanker at a fundraiser, the rules say that money *must* be used for that purpose. But if the fund-raiser is tagged as for the “Podunk Municipal Fire Department”, the restriction isn’t tight enough; the funds can be sucked into the general fund and spent any which way, on the basis that the funds are helping pay for the “support” functions of the FS.

   Bah.

9. Here in Missouri our roads have been crumbling for decades – I70 was fast approaching gravel road status.

   This sad state of affairs was used for continual tax increases and other levies but strangely it seemed like they never managed to do more than slightly slow the decline.

   Then we passed an initiative that said that monies collected for road repair had to actually be used for road repair – thus taking them out of the ‘General Fund’.

   Couple that with a fun little thing we have called the Hancock Amendment that basically says they have to use the money they took from us or give it back and we’re coming off of a couple of years of massive road projects. I70 runs the width of the state and on my last trip all the way over to St. Louis almost the entire distance was either in the process of being repaved, had been recently repaved, or showed clear signs of having been repaved last year.

   Odd coincidence that.

10. At today’s rates of FICA taxation and of SS payments, the reserve fund will begin to be used in 2012. If there’s no change in the rates, the reserve fund will be gone by 2029.

    Source? The Social Security Administration, cited by an Agora email newsletter.

    I’ve read elsewhere that present plus Boomer commitment is on the order of $60 trillion. That’s with a COLA based on the “official” inflation rate.

    Sleep well…

    Art

11. Think it was Lyndon Johnson and the Democrap controlled House and Senate that put SS into the general fund. I have no clue it if was. That happen I don’t know how many years before I was born.

12. The very FIRST recipient of monthly Social Security benefits (through December 1939, SS made one time lump payments; the first recipient of ANY SS benefits was Ernest Ackerman, who got a single check for $ 0.17 in January 1937) showed why the program was a Ponzi scheme from the beginning.

    Ida May Fuller from Vermont paid $24.75 during the three years she worked under the program (from the beginning of SS to her retirement in November 1939).

    Her VERY FIRST CHECK in January 1940 was for $22.54 (only $2.21 less than her TOTAL contribution). By the time she died in 1975, she had collected $22,888.92 in benefits.

    Of course the first Social Security record issued (SSN 055-09-0001; they were NOT issued in order) went to a man named John David Sweeney, Jr. (a 23 year old from NY). Ironically, when Sweeney died in 1974, he never collected a DIME of SS, since he was only 61 years old. . .

    And this is the program that was PROMOTED to the American public as “insurance”. NOT as a transfer payment — it was promoted by Roosevelt as “insurance”, with each citizen having an “account”.

    But it was NEVER anything but a Ponzi scheme.

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