By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

Our Social Security Administration apparently has hired a public relations consultant.

Have you gotten your Social Security “statement” in the mail?

Got mine the other day, and it's an incredibly feeble attempt at improving the program's image. If the folks in charge at the SSA think I'm going to be pleased to find out that if I work until I'm 70 — after paying 15 percent of my income for 52 years — I can receive about one-third of what I'm making right now, I begin to understand why the program is in trouble.

Twenty years from now I'll be living on a third of what I'm making now. I'm supposed to be happy about that? I've read that if I live long enough I'll probably get back all that I've paid in plus about 2 percent.

The last time anybody did me that big of a favor was when I took that “free” vacation and bought that lot in Florida.

Of course, I was never so stupid as to think that Social Security would provide all I need for retirement. I'm doing my best to invest on my own.

But it's tough to come up with much to invest when the government is already taking 15 percent for Social Security (with such a tiny expected return), plus the accumulated effect of all the other taxes — about half of what I make.

I like the twisted logic behind listing my contributions thus far as two separate numbers: “you paid” and “your employers paid.” The subtle suggestion that the government is doing me a favor by forcing my employers to match my Social Security “contribution” is ludicrous.

There are two ways the SSA can collect the money: one is for my employer to put all the money into my salary and then show it as 15 percent withheld; the other is to put half into my salary and pay the other half directly. The second way conveniently hides half of the transaction from the ignorant employee so that most people will actually argue that they pay only a little over 7 percent of their incomes to Social Security.

Bottom line, the money that I've paid into Social Security over the last 30 years could have been built into a sizeable nest egg of several hundred thousand dollars if it had been invested, or even just put into a savings account.

Even now, if I could start putting 15 percent of my income into mutual funds (in addition to what I'm already investing), and keep doing so for the next 20 years, I could then put that nest egg into income-producing investments and get a lot better return than a third of my year 2000 income.

But SSA lists my contributions with no interest and lists what I will receive when I retire as if to say, “See? Look how little you've paid and how much you'll receive.”

Balderdash! Nonsense! Highway robbery!

And yet, even so-called conservatives in the government are not working to do away with this Dickinsian system. Instead they want to “strengthen” it, or “save” it. They're even talking about using general tax funds for Social Security.

That's right. Social Security has always been funded through the 15 percent contribution, not general income taxes. But when you hear Al Gore this election season insisting that we use the budget surplus to “save” Social Security, that's exactly what he's talking about, using your income tax money to supplement the program.

In other words, they'll simply be picking a different pocket, robbing Peter to pay Paul.

And those few who, albeit timidly, dare to suggest that maybe people should be allowed to invest at least some of their own money are derided by the press and lambasted by liberals, who like to frighten old people by saying that conservatives want to put their piddling little Social Security payments “at risk.”

Newt Gingrich once suggested phasing out Social Security and the Democrats beat him bloody with mischaracterizations and outright lies designed to scare people currently receiving benefits into thinking those benefits were going to be taken away.

You can't help but admire them. Dictators in other countries have brutishly and rather clumsily seized power and have brazenly used violence to stamp out any semblance of freedom, and usually are violently replaced by new dictators. Dictators in this country have managed to stamp out people's freedom to spend their own incomes, and to get those same people to thank them (and pay them handsomely) for doing it.

Only in America.

Back to Opinion Home Page | Back to the top of the page