Photo: What's in store for America's retirees (Fancy Feast?)
By Dr. Pitchfork
This is an amazing piece of analysis by Charles Hugh Smith. Most articles on Social Security are (let's be honest) boooor-ing, but this one uses publicly available data to show that Social Security is $76B in the hole -- THIS YEAR! That's $76B, plus interest. No other analyst has actually looked at the flow of funds at Treasury to see exactly what's going on. If you were told that Social Security is "solvent" until 2037 or some-such, then you were being lied to. Read this if you want the truth. Be sure to click through to the full article so you can see the numbers for yourself.
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The Fraud at the Heart of Social Security
by Charles Hugh Smith
To understand the fraud at the heart of the Social Security Trust Fund, we start with a very simple fact: cash can only be spent once.
There are two frauds at the very heart of the Social Security system, and I am going to describe and source them in detail. After spending a number of hours poring over public data from the Social Security Administration (SSA), The U.S. Treasury and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and additional hours searching the Web for other published analyses, I can state with some authority that there are no published analyses or accounts of Social Security which incorporate the actual outlays and receipts from fiscal year 2010 in a context which includes the Social Security Trust Fund.
In other words, all published analyses are based either on SSA or CBO estimates, not the actual numbers from the Treasury, and all media reports I could find are simply cut-and-paste repetitions of these estimates. I cannot find a single source which provided any evidence of digging through the data and assembling a coherent picture of the Social Security system.
The media simply repeats "conclusions" published by "official sources" based on estimates, not facts. The laziness this implies is staggering. Meanwhile, pundits such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, however knowledgeable and talented they may be, have obviously never performed a single minute of original data collection and analysis of the voluminous public accounts available to anyone with a computer and web browser.
If this is the best our most prestigious pundits and media resources can manage, then we truly are in dire straits.
All claims that Social Security is "secure for decades" are based on bogus fantasy-estimates, as are claims that the Trust Fund is anything but a carefully contrived fraud. I am rather shocked--and I don't shock that easily--that it comes down to me, the classic independent-journalist "blogger in old blue jeans" to actually assemble the data and draw the simple common-sense conclusions which reveal Social Security as a fraud with two components: the bogus estimates, and the bogus Trust Fund.
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Kotlikoff says we're already bankrupt...
Just listen...
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More on this clip is here...