[THS] !!! Paul Craig Roberts: Social Security Will Fall To Obama...

[Peter Webster]

"Wall Street has got away with its raid on the public treasury. Now, pockets full, it
wants to pay for the heist by curtailing Social Security and Medicare. Having deprived the working population of homes, jobs, and health care, Wall Street is now after the
elderly’s old age security."


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24793.htm

Social Security Will Fall To Obama Before The Taliban Do

By Paul Craig Roberts

February 19, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Hank Paulson, the Gold Sacks
bankster/US Treasury Secretary, who deregulated the financial system, caused a
world crisis that wrecked the prospects of foreign banks and governments, caused
millions of Americans to lose retirement savings, homes, and jobs, and left taxpayers
burdened with multi-trillions of dollars of new US debt, is still not in jail. He is writing
in the New York Times urging that the mess he caused be fixed by taking away from
working Americans the Social Security and Medicare for which they have paid in
earmarked taxes all their working lives.

Wall Street’s approach to the poor has always been to drive them deeper into the
ground.

As there is no money to be made from the poor, Wall Street fleeces them by yanking
away their entitlements. It has always been thus. During the Reagan administration,
Wall Street decided to boost the values of its bond and stock portfolios by using
Social Security revenues to lower budget deficits. Wall Street figured that lower
deficits would mean lower interest rates and higher bond and stock prices.

Two Wall Street henchmen, Alan Greenspan and David Stockman, set up the Social
Security raid in this way: The Carter administration had put Social Security in the
black for the foreseeable future by establishing a schedule for future Social Security
payroll tax increases. Greenspan and Stockman conspired to phase in the payroll tax
increases earlier than was needed in order to gain surplus Social Security revenues
that could be used to finance other government spending, thus reducing the budget
deficit. They sold it to President Reagan as “putting Social Security on a sound basis.”

Along the way Americans were told that the surplus revenues were going into a
special Social Security trust fund at the U.S. Treasury. But what is in the fund is
Treasury IOUs for the spent revenues. When the “trust funds” are needed to pay
Social Security benefits, the Treasury will have to sell more debt in order to redeem
the IOUs.

Social Security was mugged again during the Clinton administration when the Boskin
Commission jimmied the Consumer Price Index in order to reduce the inflation
adjustments that Social Security recipients receive, thus diverting money from Social
Security retirees to other uses.

We constantly hear from Wall Street gangsters and from Republicans and an
occasional Democrat that Social Security and Medicare are a form of welfare that we
can’t afford, an “unfunded liability.” This is a lie. Social Security is funded with an
earmarked tax. People pay for Social Security and Medicare all their working lives. It
is a pay-as-you-go system in which the taxes paid by those working fund those who
are retired.

Currently these systems are not in deficit. The problem is that government is using
earmarked revenues for other purposes. Indeed, since the 1980s Social Security
revenues have been used to fund general government. Today Social Security
revenues are being used to fund trillion dollar bailouts for Wall Street and to fund the
Bush/Obama wars of aggression against Muslims.

Having diverted Social Security revenues to war and Wall Street, Paulson says there is
no alternative but to take the promised benefits away from those who have paid for
them.

Republicans have extraordinary animosity toward the poor. In an effort to talk
retirees out of their support systems, Republicans frequently describe Social Security
as a Ponzi scheme and “unsustainable.” They ought to know. The phony trust fund,
which they set up to hide the fact that Wall Street and the Pentagon are running off
with Social Security revenues, is a Ponzi scheme. Social Security itself has been with
us since the 1930s and has yet to wreck our lives and budget. But it only took Hank
Paulson’s derivative Ponzi scheme and its bailout a few years to inflict irreparable
damage on our lives and budget.

Years ago with stagflation defeated and a rising stock market, I favored privatizing
Social Security as a way of creating a funded retirement system and producing
greater savings and larger incomes for retirees. At that time Wall Street was
interested, not for my reasons, but in order to collect the fees from managing the
funds.

Had Social Security been privatized, I doubt that Wall Street would have been
permitted to deregulate the financial system. Too much would have been at stake.

After the latest crisis brought on by Wall Street’s dishonesty and greed, trusting Wall
Street to manage anyone’s old age pension requires a leap of faith that no intelligent
person can make.

Wall Street has got away with its raid on the public treasury. Now, pockets full, it
wants to pay for the heist by curtailing Social Security and Medicare. Having deprived the working population of homes, jobs, and health care, Wall Street is now after the
elderly’s old age security.

Social Security, formerly an untouchable “third rail of politics,” is now
“unsustainable,” while the real unsustainables--a pre-1929 unregulated financial
system and open-ended multi-trillion dollar Global War Against Terror--are the new
untouchables. This transformation signals the complete capture of American
democracy by an oligarchy of special interests.