Failed comic book supervillain, John Hayward, is not very used to having his sad, non sequitir essays read by people with an education. Writing yesterday for torture porn tract Human Events, Hayward posted a sad strawman of an essay defending Rick Perry's claim that Social Security, the program that has damn near eliminated poverty among the elderly, is a "monstrous lie." The premise? That Social Security promises, and Americans expect, that payroll taxes are put into accounts for each and every future recipient. Stop laughing. I actually read this garbage as a public service to you, dear reader.
Of course, Hayward's claim depends upon, well, the idiocy of people who would read Human Events, apparently. And no, he makes no attempt to provide the extraordinary proof to back it up. He does what wingnuts always do, he makes a statement and then just runs along with it as far as his limited vocabulary and stunted imagination can carry him. Which isn't particularly far, since he pretty much begins and ends the entire thousand blisteringly stupid words with the singularly brilliant notion that private retirement accounts would be better because the market could never cheat seniors the way government does.... I said stop laughing, dammit. This is serious guys!
Anyways, yada-yada, Social Security is not just a Ponzi scheme, but it's worse because, wait for it, "Madoff’s victims had a choice about getting suckered." Yes! The Federal government's answer to the endemic poverty and suffering of the elderly in a market economy that neither values them or cares for them is worse than a guy who left wealthy seniors so broke they had to come out of retirement and, oh yeah, probably collect Social Security to make ends meet now.
But by far the dumbest of Hayward's dumb claims is the question of ownership. Do Americans think that they have a special account sitting in a lockbox somewhere into which their payroll tax is deposited and never again touched? Do they think that this is how their money would be treated should the Republican snuff film of privatization ever come to pass? Is anyone really so goddamned addled that they think that money they've deposited in a private retirement account, let alone any other account, is just sitting there waiting for them to come take it back? I'm generally quite amenable to any "American's are blithering idiots" meme you want to toss out, but this might very well be a poorly written lie too far, even for me. I mean, yeah, we're dumb, but we're not stupid.
Banks make their money in a lot of ways, most of them hidden from their customers. For instance, ever wonder why it takes three days for the bank to put the cash from a deposited check into your account? That's called the float, and it's not because it takes so long to process the transaction, it's because they use your money to leverage often risky investments that have nothing to do with you and will not benefit you in any way. This is how it is that banks are so wealthy, while their customers generally are not. And this is how banks would treat so-called "private" Social Security accounts, given the opportunity.
By contrast, Social Security is by law mandated to invest any surplus into the safest interest bearing investment available. That's been part of the program since its inception, and for very good reason. Why let a pile of money sit dormant when you can make it work for you? This is the difference between banks and the government, the government uses your money and gives you back the interest, the banks use your money and keep it.
Social Security is based upon the age-old pension system we inherited from the Germans, who had one form or another of them dating back to the mid-17th Century. 350 years of current beneficiaries collecting from current workers, who in turn would someday be beneficiaries collecting from future workers. This system works pretty well because, as long as there are workers, there will be a Social Security system (and no, Social Security's "worker-to-beneficiary" ratio isn't dropping precipitously; it's held relatively steady for four decades now, so stop your fretting).
Somehow it doesn't seem even remotely controversial to say that this is a moral and just way to run a pension system, as the universal human imperative exists to care for those who can no longer work for their bread. That is, outside of jackals and Human Events staff writers.