by Michael Myers on February 22, 2010
Paul Craig Roberts says that Wall Street is targeting the retirement money held by the elderly. Along with Big Government looting Social Security, you must be diligent in watching the behavior of politically powerful institutions.
Link: Looting Social Security by Paul Craig Roberts
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. [click to continue…]
by Michael Myers on December 6, 2009
Governments and non-governmental organizations around the world apparently have promised more than they can deliver to the citizens and voters.
For the United States, John Mauldin says that we must open the borders to allow more people to immigrate. Unfortunately, the policy conflict between opening the borders and maintaining a war against terrorism is glaringly obvious.
More immigration can create more revenue for Social Security and Medicare. Obviously, the U.S. Government is allowing immigrants to enter the U.S. However, it seems a deceptive way to make amends for the unsustainable promises made by our leaders.
Link: A Conversation with John – Thoughts from the Frontline Weekly Newsletter – John Mauldin
Demographic changes are predictable: we know how many people are going to be here in forty years because they’re already born. We know how many forty-year-olds we’ll have in forty years because they’re already born. So, we can see these changes coming at us.
If you’re Japan, you’re walking into a demographic nightmare. Russia is a demographic train wreck. And it’s not going to be but a few decades, in the grand scheme of things, until Iran will have more people than Russia. That’s got to be fit into your equations. You’ve got to look at these large, broad changes that are happening.
In the US, we’re going to be running into the freight train of Medicare and Social Security. There’s just not any way to get around it. We’re going to have to make tough generational decisions about how to handle that. And how we handle it is going to have enormous implications for our economy. If we handle it the way it’s likely to be handled – which is by raising taxes – then we have said we’re making a decision, conscious or not, that we’re going to become Europe. That means high residual unemployment and difficult, slower growth of individual opportunities.
There are other large changes when you talk about the demographic issues. Europe would have to take massive numbers of immigrants in order to support their system. They’re just not prepared for that. Neither is Japan. The US is blessed with a world population that wants to come here and are not very culturally different from us – especially the Hispanic populations. We’re going to need those immigrants. I think that one of the most economically suicidal things we’re doing today is trying to figure out how to close the borders. We need to be doing the opposite. We need to figure out how to open the borders. It needs to be a more rational policy than we have now. Again, you have to put those things into the financial equations.
by Michael Myers on April 14, 2009
The viability of Social Security as a source of retirement income is fading fast. As the U.S. government drowns in debt, it is using every possible source of capital to try to maintain the illusion of stability.
You must save and invest wisely to fund your retirement. It’s hard to see how Social Security can meet its obligations when the baby boomers need it.
John Mauldin and Chris Martenson document the disturbing trend below.
Link: John Mauldin, Investor’s Insight
Everyone knows that the government spends the Social Security surpluses on current needs, “borrowing” the money and putting it into a “Social Security Trust Fund,” which is basically just US debt we owe to the trust fund. In other words, there is no trust fund with anything other than paper debt. It is accounting legerdemain.
Everyone assumed that the real problem would come sometime later next decade, when there would no longer be surpluses. In 2008, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected there would be $703 billion in surpluses from 2009-18. Recently, the CBO has revised those estimates downward. It now projects surpluses to be only $83 billion. Here is a table that was sent to me from a blog by Chris Martensen. (http://www.chrismartenson.com) [click to continue…]