What Does Smoke Have To Do With Social Security?

       It really doesn't matter whether you're retired or still working. What you paid into Social Security or are still paying into the trust fund you can be sure that the government has never paid any interest on that money. the federal government is supposed to hold that money in trust for us. They are allowed to borrow from that account, but they have never paid any interest on what they borrowed.
       So now when you hear that the fund doesn't have, or won't have, enough to pay retirees in a couple of decades, they don't mention the interest they should have paid, but didn't, on all the money the federal government borrowed. See, here's the thing. Congress likes to give the people nice things. Like highways and bridges to nowhere, you know, the pork that our legislators have depended on for as long as memory serves.
       In order to pay for all these great helpful gifts to their constituents, Congress has always borrowed from the S.S. Trust Fund. Now, I can tell you with the utmost assurance, that while Congress borrowed that money, they never mentioned that fact in any of their speeches and they certainly never paid it back, even without interest.
       In order to create a smoke screen to hide that fact from us, they began calling Social Security an "entitlement" and part of the national budget So, is something that you paid into your whole working life and that should have been paid an interest on, truly an entitlement? Or is it more the case of a debt unpaid by the government? Of course for the government to admit it's a debt, it would have to acknowledge that they've been cheating us all along. Ya see, if they factored in even a minimal interest and included all the folks who paid in but never collected because they died before they reached the age to receive any payments, there'd be more than enough to pay it's debt to retirees into the next century.
       But it's easier to claim the fund is running out of money by using that smoke screen to confuse us than it would be to begin to pay for the things they want to give to their constituents (you and me) by raising our taxes to pay for the pork. So just what is pork? It's a $200 screw driver, a $300 toilet seat, a $2500 per person party, a billion $$$ airplane that still can't be flown and a bridge to nowhere, just to mention a few.
       So the next time you hear a politician talk about this Social Security entitlement, just be careful not to breath too much of that second hand smoke. It's bad for your health and it's bad for your pocketbook's health too.