|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Repeat After Me … Phil Brennan
In any election campaign involving the National Socialist Democrat Party (NSDP), truth is always the first casualty. These people simply cannot tell the truth about anything. Tragically, they get away with it because the Marxist mass media allow them to, and also because they dress their lies in the seductive garb of class warfare, which distracts the public from looking at the less seductive facts. As we approach this year's upcoming congressional elections, where nothing less than the fate of the Bush administration and its devotion to the liberty of the American people hangs in the balance, the same old lies are being peddled by the NSDP, which is frantic in its desire to assume control of Capitol Hill, which Democrats fervently believe is theirs by divine right. It has been said that repetition is the surest method of selling your bill of goods – a fact that the storm troopers of the Socialist Democrat left both understand and endlessly employ in their drive to deceive large numbers of the American people – and right now the NSDP distortions are being ceaselessly drummed into the voters' heads as we approach November. It is not an easy matter to counter this drumbeat of lies and distortions couched in the deceptive language of class warfare. The NSDP sees the great mass of the American people as a bunch of clueless dunderheads who can be sold the Brooklyn Bridge over and over again, providing they can be convinced that they are the victims of the soulless Republican Party – underdogs who exist merely to be exploited by bloated fat-cat corporations and their GOP cronies. But the tactic of repetition also can be used to counter NSDP lies and distortions. Tragically, Republicans don't seem to grasp that fact, so they allow themselves to be portrayed as fascists, as Nazis, as stupid, uncaring servants of an exploitive corporate oligarchy. They are, we are told by the NSDP, enemies of the people – the same term used by the old Soviet Union to describe freedom-seeking dissidents confined in the brutal Communist prison camps of the Gulag Archipelago. If the truth were to be told, there are no greater domestic enemies of the people than the members of the NSDP, who will move heaven and earth to keep Americans locked up in a giant welfare state owned and operated for the sole welfare of the National Socialist Democrat Party. Hopefully, things will change in the coming months. God willing, Republicans will begin to appreciate the value of repetition and go on the attack, telling the truth about the issues the NSDP routinely uses to deceive the voting public. They could start with telling the truth about the NSDP's most favorite of all lies – the facts about Social Security, surely the most misunderstood federal program. The NSDP lies are familiar – they've been telling them for years, with a new wrinkle adopted from time to time. Republicans want to take Social Security benefits away from senior citizens, they want to loot the Social Security Trust Fund, which the NSDP pretends to stand guard over, the president wants to allow workers to risk their Social Security dollars by investing them in a shaky stock market. Lies, lies and more lies. The GOP should be repeating the following facts over and over and over again, until the most hard-of-hearing citizen hears and understands them and appreciates how many lies they've been told by the shameless demagogues of the NSDP. 1. No government, Republican or NSDP, could survive if it were to cut one cent of the Social Security benefits now being paid to senior citizens. No political party in its right mind would even consider doing so – ever. The federal government could be on the verge of a financial collapse, but the Social Security benefits would somehow continue to go to current recipients. To say otherwise is to needlessly alarm elderly people, merely to frighten seniors into voting Democrat. This does not mean to say that everything is hunky dory with the SS system. It needs to be reformed and reformed quickly. Otherwise, sometime in the future – experts disagree just when – there will be more people collecting Social Security payments than there are workers whose SS taxes pay for the benefits. But the NSDP isn't interested in reforming the system. It is only interested in lying about it to win votes from those among whom it has sown confusion about the real facts. 2. Republicans want to loot the Social Security Trust Fund. Oh! What Social Security Trust Fund? Does the NSDP mean that box filled with trillions of dollars of IOUs the government can never redeem without raising taxes through the roof, or inflating the currency until a loaf of bread costs $500? There is no real money in the so-called trust fund – just all those worthless IOUs. Every year the feds collect the SS part of FICA taxes, use part of the money to pay current recipients their benefits and then take the rest and spend it on whatever Congress wants to spend it on. Here are the facts put together by Matt Moore, a policy analyst with the National Center for Policy Analysis, that should be drummed into voters' ears until they finally understand the con game the NSDP has been playing for years. "The Social Security's surplus is not saved or invested in real assets. It is actually transferred out of the trust fund the minute it flows into the government's hands. The government swaps the trust fund's cash with U.S. Treasury bonds and the cash is 'loaned' to the general budget – with the intent to repay the trust fund eventually – and spent on other government programs like education and highways. "The question is, when the bills come due, how will we repay the Social Security trust fund if the money has already been spent? "That brings us to the fact that everyone is trying to ignore. In 2015, the government will have to cash in the first of the trust fund's Treasury bonds – $11 billion worth – to meet its expenses that year, and that's just the beginning. Between 2015 and 2039, Social Security will cash in more than $4 trillion in Treasury bonds – until all the Treasury bonds credited to Social Security have been reclaimed. "To reclaim the trust fund's Treasury bonds, the government will have to generate money from the general budget. However, the government only collects a limited amount of money each year. We will have to decide whether the $4 trillion will be generated by tax hikes, spending cuts on other programs, retirement benefit cuts or by purchasing more debt. We will feel these gouges well before 2039." And those Democrats who charge Republicans with looting the phony "trust fund"? Well, lookie here: NSDP/Clinton Raided $792,819,000 from Social Security:
THERE IS NO MONEY IN YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY ACCOUNT. THERE NEVER WAS. IT WAS ALL SPENT THE DAY IT ARRIVED AT THE SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION. GOT THAT? REPEAT AFTER ME: THERE IS NO SOCIAL SECURITY TRUST FUND – THERE IS NO MONEY IN MY SOCIAL SECURITY ACCOUNT. IF YOU DIE THE DAY BEFORE YOU REACH 65, ALL THAT MONEY YOU PAID INTO THE SYSTEM IS GONE. IT NEVER WAS YOURS. YOUR HEIRS GET ZILCH. 3. The NSDP says President Bush wants workers to gamble in a risky stock market with part of their SS taxes. Here's what Milton Friedman, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics and a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, told the New York Times on Jan. 11, 1999.: "As support grows for transforming Social Security from a pay-as-you-go defined benefit program to a system of individually owned, privately invested accounts, critics of privatization have warned that making the transition to such a new system would impose substantial new costs on today's young workers. However, given a proper understanding of Social Security's current unfunded liabilities – variously estimated at from $4 trillion to $11 trillion – there are no real transition costs to privatizing Social Security, merely the explicit recognition of current implicit debt. "A privatized Social Security system should not be mandatory. The fraction of a person's income that it is reasonable for him or her to set aside for retirement depends on that person's circumstances and values. It makes no more sense to specify a minimum fraction for all people than to mandate a minimum fraction of income that must be spent on housing or transportation. Our general presumption is that individuals can best judge for themselves how to use their resources. The ongoing discussion about privatizing Social Security would benefit from paying more attention to fundamentals, rather than dwelling simply on nuts and bolts of privatization." The 60 Plus Association, a national non-partisan senior citizens organization, is launching what it calls a traveling truth squad to counter election-year Social Security scare tactics. According to 60 Plus President Jim Martin, he was actively enlisting experts from all fields: academics, economists, people from public policy groups, senior citizens, minorities, Baby Boomers, Generation X-ers and union members. Here's what he had to say about the terror campaign being waged against seniors: "60 Plus pledges to send traveling truth squad members, especially from the African-American and Hispanic-American communities [those hurt the most by the negative rate of return of the current system], into the battle in every Congressional district and every state in America to set the record straight. "A prime example of these smear tactics included the Medi-Scare telephone campaign directed at Republican voters in the Jeb Bush for Governor race in 1996, resulting in the closest election loss in Florida Gubernatorial history. "A year later, Governor Lawton Chiles' campaign, on the eve of issuance of a Senate subpoena, admitted it made the bogus calls without identifying that the calls were financed by the Governor's committee. "There are at least 50 or 60 Social Security experts, Democrats and Republicans alike, who 60 Plus can call on for this project. We can assign a state to one or more of them, sending in several experts if needed in key senior citizen states like California, where 60 Plus has 95,000 members, and Florida where 60 Plus has close to 40,000. Even little South Dakota will be on our radar screen in case seniors are misled by political candidates. "One political party has ridden the twin horses of hypocrisy – Social Security and Medi-Scare – for over 30 years, bringing these scare tactics to a fine art form. "It's time to stop this sucker punching of seniors. "For any politician from either party to imply that Social Security or Medicare is going to be taken away is demagoguery of the worst sort and for 40 years I've resented these false allegations to scare seniors into the voting booth. These are shameless attacks that I call the politics of fear and I'm sick and tired of it. "Having come to Washington as a newspaper reporter in 1962, I've witnessed savage Social Security attacks falsely accusing Barry Goldwater of jeopardizing the system when in fact the Senator from Arizona was ahead of his time in recognizing that the pay as you go tax system was due to fail because lower birth rates meant fewer workers, thus less payroll taxes to finance seniors who were living longer and longer. "A system that worked when seniors died at an average age of 65 no longer does so now that we're living into our 80s, 90s and beyond. A look at my own family bears this out. My favorite senior, my mom, is 85, while my stepfather is a hale and hearty 102 years young! "A 2% tax on $3,000 income when the system started in 1935 yielded $60 from 15 to 20 workers to support each retiree. But today, a tax of 12.4% on $84,900 of income produces a whopping $10,527.60 annually, but still the system is going broke because of two factors: lower birth rates [only three workers to support each retiree] and seniors are living longer. The retirement of these baby boomers in just 10 more years is the handwriting on the wall that Goldwater worried about. "Responsible reform-minded Democrats and Republicans alike have coalesced to try and solve this financing problem and all have agreed, across the political spectrum, that a portion of this 12.4% tax should be invested by professional market managers in a conservative mix of stocks and bonds to increase the rate of return for retirees. "That's the wave of the future as evidenced by like-minded plans in a dozen different countries around the globe. Retirees and those nearing retirement are safe and secure and do not have to leave the current system. They will receive their full benefits. But it's time for America to move with these countries into the 21st century and it's way past time for certain politicians to cease and desist from their demagogic attacks that scare seniors. "The role of the traveling truth squad will be to set the record straight whenever these misleading attacks are made, such as the false message that Jeb Bush would take away Medicare, as if a Governor of a state could dictate a federal program such as Medicare." These are the facts. If the GOP is to survive the November elections still in control of the House and regain control of the Senate, it simply has to repeat these facts over and over again, as loudly as it can. By so doing, it will expose for all to see the atrocious character of an NSDP that will tell any lies and engage in the most egregious behavior to win and hold the power it has brutally misused for so long. Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute. He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
A product that might interest you:
|
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2009 NewsMax.Com |