Obama's Impeachable Social Security Threat

For the past two weeks President Obama's veiled threat to withhold social security checks on August 3 has influenced the debt ceiling debate. On July 12 CBS quoted the President as saying, "I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it." In fact, there are many alternatives to withholding Social Security such as furloughing employees in non-essential bureaucracies, such as the Departments of Labor, Education and Energy. Obama's use of Social Security for partisan purposes is fraudulent.

Social Security involved fraud from day one. In the 1930s, in order to convince Americans to accept it, the Democrats made two mutually contradictory claims, expressed by Professor J. Douglas Brown of  Princeton University.  The first claim was that Social Security is an insurance plan, secured through a trust fund, that will return a fair benefit to participants.  The second claim was that Social Security was a welfare benefit that subsidizes lower-wage Americans.  It did this by using a formula that provided proportionately higher benefits to the lowest salary levels.  It established pay bands, and the highest percentages were paid to the lowest salary bands.  Unless participants took the time to review the benefit structure, they could be easily defrauded into believing that Social Security was not a welfare plan but rather an insurance plan.  Fraud was the Democrats' marketing strategy.


The public was told that there is a trust fund. In fact, Social Security was designed as a pay-as-you-go plan, essentially a pyramid scheme that depended on consistent demographic growth.  But there was a depression followed by a baby boom that was followed by a baby bust.  Rather than hold good on its claim that there was a trust fund, Congress proceeded to steal the funds in the Social Security trust and used them for other purposes, chiefly to win votes.  Moreover, despite the lack of actuarial soundness, Congress raised benefits in the 1970s but could not fund the increased benefits.  Then, it decreased benefits in 1983 for people in their twenties and younger who were scrambling to make ends meet in a permanently declining and increasingly socialist economy.

In other words, Social Security was a fraud from day one; Congress has acted in ways that would put private sector benefit sponsors into prison; indeed, it has stolen the already insufficient funds about which it has consistently lied to the public.


Now President Obama commits an additional fraud.  Having scammed the American public into establishing a fraudulent program, having lied about the program's nature, having promised benefits it could not pay, having stolen the money that was put into the fund, Obama now threatens to openly breach the most elementary standard of fiduciary and moral duty to trust beneficiaries. He aims to use the fund as a partisan football.   If Obama were a private pension fund manager even threatening to use pension money for purposes other than designated by the trust would be a breach of fiduciary duty.

Obama's threat to use Social Security as a partisan football is a criminal act and an impeachable one.