Multiple choice: Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Gov. Rick Perry(R-TX) are two of the dumbest people alive or they are a real life Orwellian nightmare or just hate America’s seniors – Rep. Ryan: Rick Perry is right on Social Security
Social Security fits the technical definition of a Ponzi scheme, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told conservative Laura Ingraham on her radio show.
“It’s not a criminal enterprise, but it’s a pay-as-you-go system, where earlier investors — or say, taxpayers — get a positive rate of return, and the most recent investors — or taxpayers — get a negative rate of return,” he said. “That is how those schemes work.”
Perry’s description of the Social Security as a “Ponzi sceheme” has been attacked by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Perry’s leading challenger for the GOP presidential nomination. Romney criticized Perry for scaring seniors and wanting to abolish the program, warning that the Republican nominee needs to work to reform the program.
[ ]…The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee pushed back against Ryan’s comments.
“Ryan’s belief that Social Security works like a Ponzi scheme proves — once and for all — that House Republicans have really declared a war on seniors,” DCCC spokesman Jesse Ferguson said in a statement. “A Ponzi scheme is Bernie Madoff ripping off Americans — not Social Security benefits that seniors earned and depend on during retirement.”
Ryan may have well said that yes food could be described as dirt as they are both physical substances. There are many reasons that conservatives cannot have an honest debate, one of them is their Orwellian attack on language and meaning. Why not say life insurance is a scheme. You pay into it and when you die you actually collect nothing. The pay out to your beneficiary may be more than you paid into it – a Marxist ponzi scheme for sure. Trading stocks seems to have become a scheme. The value of stocks, supposedly determined by the value of the company, can suddenly plummet in price based on speculation and rumors. Words either have meaning or they serve as right-wing propaganda. Let’s not discuss or debate anything because we can all use the same words and mean two different things – conservatives have declared war on the American English language. Is that where we are, everyone gets to create their own reality. As fanatical as Ryan, Perry and the rest sound, the comments at the link do not bode well for the concept of an informed citizenry making wise decisions. There is the often repeated and tedious claim that the government should not run any programs that provide a social safety net because everyone should look out for themselves. I’m pro maximum self-sufficiency. Though unlike that writer and others who think in such simplistic terms I have enough humility to realize that I am not in utter and complete control of my life. I live in a complex democratic society with a complex free market. I do not control all the buttons and gears anymore than the vast majority of Americans. Strangers I will never meet in boardrooms across America, Europe and Asian have a tremendous amount of control over every American’s financial future. When they screw up and they do regularly, all of my and millions of regular working class America’s financial plans go down the tubes. In the recession that started in 2007 millions of Americans with private retirement plans and pensions lost millions in value, not because they were lazy Marxists, but because the people who we trusted to run the economy were greedy, stupid and irresponsible. Social Security is insurance against the craziness and greed. If worse comes to worse you’ll at least be able to have shelter and food. In fact Social Security grew out of the Great Depression. This is a Ponzi scheme from a breaking story at the WSJ, U.S. Alleges Poker Site Stacked Deck
On Tuesday, the U.S. Justice Department in a civil suit accused Messrs. Lederer, Ferguson and Furst, and another director of the company behind the Full Tilt Poker website, of defrauding thousands of online poker players out of more than $300 million that is still owed to them. The government said that, in total, the 23 owners of the site had taken out $444 million in distributions over the years.
The Justice Department’s civil suit against Full Tilt alleges that in 2010, Full Tilt began having trouble accepting new bets from players, thanks to U.S. efforts to crack down on payment-processing services for online gambling. But the U.S. says that Full Tilt’s owners kept paying themselves millions of dollars anyway, fraudulently depleting the player funds on deposit with the company.
“Full Tilt was not a legitimate poker company, but a global Ponzi scheme,” said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in a statement Tuesday. The U.S. government views online poker operations, at least those that cross state lines, as illegal.
Full Tilt was a deliberate fraud. Money was taken in with no intention of paying back people who were owed money. It was supervised by private entities not the federal government. Full Tilt lured people into playing with promises of payoffs. During one of the debates among GOP presidential candidates it was a contest to see who was more like Reagan. When it comes to the social safety net Reagan was a flaming liberal compared to this group of conservatives wackos – By today’s Tea Party standards, the Republican icon would have been a Leninist-Marxist-socialist America hater.
2. Reagan Shored Up Social Security
Last Rick Perry reprised his attack on Social Security, calling the program that has kept millions of seniors out of poverty a “monstrous lie.” But if Perry is going to keep insisting that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, that would make Ronald Reagan its Bernie Madoff.
After boasting of his plans to privatize Social Security so that “those who can make better provisions for themselves” be allowed to do so, Reagan bailed out the program to the tune of $165 billion. In fact, Republicans can thank Reagan that they even have a Social Security to rail against.
The Reagan-O’Neill Social Security deal was not the best route to take in the long run and it did raise payroll taxes, but it did save Soc. Sec. for the immediate future at the time. The Right wants to have it both ways as usual – to be the party of Reagan yet go full tilt destroying income security for seniors.
The Four Stooges write a letter – McConnell, Boehner, Kyl, and Cantor’s Letter to the Fed
But an official letter from members of the House and Senate to the Fed is more official, and more threatening to the Fed’s independence than a speech from an individual member of Congress. Robert Reich explains the objections:
The Republican’s Latest Ploy to Keep the Economy Lousy through Election Day, by Robert Reich: …To say it’s unusual for a political party to try to influence the Fed is an understatement.
When I was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, it was considered a serious breach of etiquette — not to say potentially economically disastrous — even to comment publicly about the Fed. Everyone understood how important it is to shield the nation’s central bank from politics.
If global investors suspect the Fed is responding to political pressure of any kind, investors will lose trust in the nation’s monetary policies. Even if the pressure is to tighten the money supply and keep interest rates high, it’s still politics. And once politics intrudes, lenders of all stripes worry that it will continue to intrude in all sorts of ways. The inevitable result: Lenders charge more for lending us money.
The letter puts Bernanke and his colleagues in a huge bind. If they decide against another round of so-called “quantitative easing” to lower long-term rates and boost the economy, they may look like they’re caving to congressional Republicans. If they decide to go ahead notwithstanding, they’re bucking the Republicans and siding with Democrats. Either way, they’re open to the charge they’re playing politics.
Congressional Republicans evidently don’t care. They want Obama out, whatever the cost. Besides, they’ve never met a government institution they don’t mind trashing.
Those of us who survived the Bush 43 er are all too familiar with the scorched earth mentality of the conservative movement. Trashing the economy is fair game in the conservative playbook because it is just politics. Blue collar conservatives don’t seem to mind because they think they’ll be miraculously spared when the wildfire spreads. They have this bewildering and sick tendency to enjoy self flagellation anyway. If the economy does grind down another notch that puts them a little closer to starting the country all over again with a clean slate, where they can have that pure perfect free market where nutt’n ever goes wrong. Instead of or rather in addition to fantasy-land Constitutional originalism, they’re pushing and hope’n for some economic originalism. And if they have to take down millions of American families to accomplish that, well it has thus been divined. Stan Collender’s conclusion on the Four Stooge’s letter,
Today’s letter is far worse than anything that happened last November. This warning is directly from the Republican congressional leadership instead of just outside economists and strategists, and the letter is almost sinister and ominous in its tone. The treat that terrible things will come to those who help the economy when the GOP is not in charge of the White House sounds very real.
My question: If Rick Perry — one of the wanna-be GOP candidates for president — says that Bernanke’s actions to date have been treasonous, what do you call today’s Republican demand that the federal agency with the legal responsibility and the potential power to help GDP grow and unemployment to fall not do anything to help the American economy?
BS is the mildest term I can think of for this situation.
Many Republicans are positive they love the USA. It is a twisted love. It is the love a parent shouts as social services take away the child that has been beaten into a coma by the same parents. It is the kind of love only rabid nationalists have for their country. History has shown repeatedly that never turns out well.
The Long Goodbye 