OPINION:
You do not really do justice to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Ponzi scheme in your editorial (“Repairing FDR’s Ponzi scheme,” Comment & Analysis, Friday).
Ida Fuller was the first recipient of Social Security. Having paid in $22, she lived to be 100 and got back $20,944.42. What a deal Social Security is - especially for the politicians promoting it.
Essentially, you give your politician five cents, he borrows 95 cents from China and hands you back a dollar. What isn’t to like about it? To top it all off, in the process, you hand your grandchildren a sovereign debt crisis and a society that unravels because of that crisis, much like Greece has. Ethical Social Security is an oxymoron and so is any entitlement program labeled “social insurance” because none of it has any viable underlying financial structure.
You forgot to mention in your piece that the Social Security trust fund has about $2.5 trillion in assets. Yet in order to redeem one dollar from this bogus trust fund, you must first borrow that dollar from the Chinese. So what happens when the bond buyers say no to yet another U.S. Treasury bond auction? Your Social Security trust fund assets turn out to be worthless, as they always have been.
Treating the ability to borrow from future generations as an asset has always been an act of national suicide, not to mention moral depravity. Social Security should not be saved or reformed, nor can it be. Every attempt to rework an entitlement program, be it Social Security or Medicare (soon to become Obamacare), has always increased borrowing and dumped the resulting financial mess onto the unborn.
SAMUEL BURKEEN
Reston, Va.
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