Maybe the government should get out of the ponzi scheme business. Normal people go to jail for setting up such payment systems.
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I agree on that. I am not a fan of a nanny state. The SSA is a “people can’t think for themselves, so we will” nanny state idea. I would be happy for it to go away and to manage my own earnings.
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SSI was set up as a Ponzi scheme. Even worse, they excess revenue was “loaned” to other govt agencies. That money will have to be repaid sometime in near future.
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I won’t be baited in any language. Case closed.
I have one comment, perhaps it’s more of a rhetorical question. From the article:
“The S.S.A. also has other problems with improper payments, including overpaying real-life beneficiaries who don’t accurately report their income or work status. While those improper payments add up to billions of dollars annually, they amount to less than 1 percent of what the agency spends on benefits every year.”
This only adds up to billions of dollars annually. Just like trying to quantify the line “everyone needs to pay their fare share”, what percent or billions of dollars of waste and potential fraud of taxpayer funds is an “acceptable” number to .gov or to the citizens paying the tab?
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My only online expense is for Netflix and my internet provider. You are correct, Mr Martenson is selling a product I don’t need, but I do get reliable data here at Peak Prosperity for free. In the 15 years or so that I have been visiting this site, i rarely comment. I made thousands of comments on RT before they changed their format for commenting. I followed other people and some of them followed me. The comment section was the best part of RT, and now I rarely visit the site. The value in other words, was in the content of the commenters, one of which was me. I value the content that Peak Prosperity provides as a community service, and I wish him well in his endeavors, but I will be reserving my creativity for open source type venues. I don’t know enough about socialism or communism to judge their merits, although I know far more than most on the subjects, but I do understand capitalism, especially American capitalism, I know it for the fraud that it is, and always has been. The driving force of all free market capitalist systems is to monopolize the market. The Chinese are doing miracles over there with their version of capitalism, where as ours is going to die-off soon with most of our current population, so you see the contradiction in saving up chips/money in this monopoly game economy and trying to use them to get a monopolistic jump on the recovery side? I personally don’t think running with the herd and making preparations to escape the herd just before going off the cliff is a sound strategy, at least not for me, so I can’t waste what bandwidth I have preparing for a future that I’m not likely to be apart of, although I started preparations with a freeze drier and night vision 10 years ago.
If those numbers are anywhere close to real, then it’s not just a “mess,” it’s a structural failure that’s been ignored for decades. Imagine what $5 billion a year redirected properly could mean for healthcare, education, or fixing infrastructure. The bigger question is: if this has been documented by the OIG and still nothing changes, do we even have a system capable of correcting itself without a total overhaul?
…without a total revolution. No, we don’t. It’s that bad.