OPINION:
Social Security is without a doubt a Ponzi scheme, but so is Medicare (“It is a Ponzi scheme,” Comment & Analysis, Wednesday).
Medicare Part B premiums cover all of 25 percent of medical costs, so how could it be otherwise? Both Social Security and Medicare are political schemes that net mainly the Democratic Party short-term power by shoving the costs onto future generations. The practice is morally bankrupt, to say the least.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt sold Social Security as an insurance program. There never really was a way for the government to take people’s money and invest it, nor was there ever a way for the federal government to collect insurance premiums from people and establish both a trust fund for those premiums and an actuarial connection between premiums and payouts.
The insurance structure, if created by the federal government, would be unconstitutional. This is why Obamacare is being litigated by the Justice Department as a tax, not an insurance premium.
The insurance terminology was adopted by Roosevelt, whose goal was not to help the masses but to garner political power for the Democrats. Neither Social Security nor Medicare has a trust fund from which to make payouts, employs an actuarial relationship between payouts and premiums or involves a legally binding contract amounting to a property right. You are not buying insurance with your payroll tax. If you thought you had been buying insurance, then you must have missed the fact that Social Security and its whole federal accounting structure got tossed under the bus by President Obama during the debt crisis.
Having no viable insurance structure, Social Security and Medicare are economically unstable and destined to self-destruct every few decades. Eventually, the younger generation catches on and refuses to be left at the end of the Ponzi scheme.
SAMUEL BURKEEN
Reston
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