Every wage earner in the USA should feel very, very angry, and in fact, enraged, once they understand the depth & duration of the
Big Lie behind Social Security and FICA taxes.
That
anger, however, is something to both acknowledge, worry about, and productively manage. Don’t get angry, get even, by getting free. Reflect on the bitter fact that you, your family, your parents, and your grandparents never even needed to pay FICA taxes the last 70-some years. That will really cause some resentment. Revolutions are always justified, but rebellions are always betrayed. So please use your head and consider how to right this perpetuated wrong, not just be angry about it. Let's go back to FDR's concluding statement some time after enactment of the Social Security pact.
In the course of ... discussion [Luther Gulick] raised the question of the ultimate abandonment [of] the pay roll taxes in connection with old age security and unemployment relief in the event of another period of depression.
...
[Gulick] suggested that it had been a mistake to levy these taxes in the 1930’s when the social security program was originally adopted.
...
FDR said, “I guess you’re right on the economics. They are politics all the way through. We put those pay roll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program. Those taxes aren’t a matter of economics, they’re straight politics.”
Please re-read that several times, and let it sink in for a moment. Justice, fairness and logic were all sacrificed to politics, right from the start. Like with many political processes, later remedies were pre-conceived, but never fulfilled. In fact, the baked in wrongs only became more entrenched with time, through the filter of intense lobbying & propaganda.
I wonder how my grandparents stood for it at the time.
Someone tell
Simpson & Bowles that we have millions of sub-contractors clamoring to suckle at the national "tit" they're so fond of alluding to, all in the name of serving the electorate they mindlessly want to suck initiative from in the form of fiat currency. The core mission & policy given Congress in the US Constitution is to direct policies & public contracting so as to care for the welfare of the people. Simpson & Bowles have it so squarely backwards that one is embarrassed for them, and for those whom they're misleading.
Jumping to the present,
how would YOU tell 150 million salaried adults that their wages needn’t ever have BEEN taxed their entire, working life?
And furthermore, that they were taxed ONLY to keep one class of people over-taxed and under-funded relative to another class of people? Worse, that the same was true of the FICA taxes levied on their parents, AND their grandparents!
Them’s fightin’ words!
There could and should be hell to pay for all that have contributed to that truly disgusting crime, through silence, fear or complicity. If that’s not treason of the highest order, then we may as well all emigrate to some country where honesty, courage, morality & national ambition still reign.
The scale of the Social Security fraud leaves one nauseous. It’s not what one wants to think of one’s own country.
To realize that there are whole foundations dedicated solely to maintaining a regressive tax on labor, only exacerbates the shame. For instance, staff at the supposed
Social Security Works campaign still actively promote the self-deceiving myth that FDR desperately resorted to. A main plank of SSW is that the regressive FICA taxes do not regressively tax labor, but actually protect the rights of working people to an adequate pension by providing them with a unique, tax-based citizen's right. Whew! Talk about Control Frauds perverting our own thinking, and then expecting us to thank them for the benefit of sharing unequally in national output!
Following adoption of a fully-fiat currency system in 1933, taxing labor cannot be accepted as the prerequisite for any public policy whatsoever. If we can - as simple policy - vote subsidies for highways, space exploration, worldwide military capabilities, corporate farming, and endless corporate supports - from agriculture to research - then we can also support our own elderly citizens as a simple policy. Over-taxing working citizens throughout their productive years is an incomprehensible burden on national Output. What were we thinking? Why have we let this proceed so long? Do we WANT the USA to be far, far less than it could be, not merely less?
For any person who perpetuates a fraud after being advised of operational reality, the fraud is no longer innocent. It is self-defeating for their own family, children & country. It is treason.
Innocent Fraud As a Business Model = saying regulation must NOT be n-dimensional … and succeeding with that propaganda.
We have burdened lower-income classes with huge penalties relative to the wealthy & frauds - since 1934 - by taxing the poor through FICA taxes, to pre-charge for the pittance an increasingly richer aggregate “may” give them “if” they live long enough.
That’s essentially just a way for one class or clan to over-tax & under-fund a perceived competitor class; instead of working together productively. It’s a tragic travesty, the bitterness of which should bring any thinking person to tears!
By doing this we’ve drastically curtailed the return-on-coordination that would have been possible the last 70+ years. Why are we working hard to be less, rather than more, than the sum of our parts?
Of course professional jargons and semantic diversity are problems, and of course public policy can’t be guided by accounting alone. Understanding the
reserve-accounting underlying a fiat currency system is a necessary but not sufficient step in aggregate agility. So is recruiting people from the 2000 & growing
NAICS fields so that they can openly discuss & explore our constantly growing options. To realize even a pittance of our insanely great public options, we need to be acknowledging & using & fusing distinct jargons, and above all else COORDINATING graciously & gracefully!
