Some of our faithful readers challenged our claim in yesterday’s HOTLINE that Social Security and Medicare are going bankrupt. What about all the trillions of dollars stored in the “trust fund” they asked?
Such is the nature and effectiveness of the government propaganda campaign that many Americans believe everything is hunky dory – which is like a passenger on the Titanic saying the voyage is going well – so far.
Sorry. Things aren’t just fine. We dug a little deeper and got the numbers for how large the unfunded liabilities are in these programs as of the end of the fiscal year 2021. The chart below shows the financial calamity.
As for the “trust fund” supposedly filled with the surplus payroll tax revenues over the past two or three decades, again, sorry. Congress spent those payroll tax dollars on everything from Amtrak, to foreign aid, to the war in Iraq. There is no “trust fund.” That vault is empty.
Imagine for a moment that you were the CEO of a company and you snatched the money in the workers’ pension fund and spent it on other operations. You’d go to jail for running a Ponzi Scheme. That’s what Congress has been doing for fifty years, and it’s worse than anything Bernie Madoff ever did.
2) House Votes 250-173 To Block DC's New Soft-On-Crime Criminal Code
As we’ve reported: DC’s city council - over the opposition of the mayor – approved a looney measure that moves toward decriminalizing violent crime in the nation’s murder capital.
Good news: Republicans in the House were unanimous and they were joined by 31 Democrats to overturn the law. One Democrat who voted aye was Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota. She was assaulted in the elevator of her DC apartment building several hours before the vote. Here are the 31 Dems who voted yes:
The measure now heads to the Senate, where we expect an illuminating floor debate on where Democrats stand on fighting crime.
3) On The Economy: Americans Aren’t Feeling The Love
President Biden claimed in his State of the Union speech the U.S. economy has emerged from the pandemic “stronger than when we entered it.”
Too bad voters aren’t buying it. A new Gallup poll finds 50 percent of Americans says they’re financially worse off now than last year. That's the highest percentage since the Great Recession of 2008.
As for Biden’s claim that his claim that he is helping those at the bottom, a full 61% of lower-income Americans say they are worse off.
4) How About 80,000 New Border Patrol Agents, Not 80,000 More IRS Auditors?
As we pointed out on Wednesday, one of President Biden’s worst State of the Union whoppers was his claim that the border issue is under control. An all-time high of 2.4 million illegal aliens crossed into the U.S. last year, and Congressional testimony from four top Border Patrol officials this week confirmed the situation is only getting worse.
"I don't have the correct adjective to describe what's going on” at the border, John Modlin, the Border Patrol’s chief in the Tucson sector, told the House Oversight and Accountability committee. “I do not have enough agents within Tucson sector to deal with the flow.”
That flow has quadrupled to 250,000 a year just since 2020. Gloria Chavez, the chief of the Rio Grande Valley Sector, says there has been a sharp increase in “criminal migrants, gang members, hard narcotics, firearms.”
What made the hearing worse was the revelation by Chairman James Comer that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had attempted to prevent several of the border chiefs from testifying.
We will say it for the umpteenth time: until we end the chaos at the border, we won’t be able to admit the legal immigrants this country so desperately needs in every area from agriculture workers to high-tech brainiacs.
Biden has proposed a new wealth tax that would tax unrealized capital gains of millionaires. Meanwhile, Democrats in at least six states, including New York, California, Washington, and Maryland have proposed taxes on wealth. In the case of California, this wealth tax would even be imposed after the resident has moved to another state.
How have these “sock it to the rich” taxes worked out around the world? Here’s a good analysis from Citizens Against Government Waste:
“In 1990, there were 12 European countries that had imposed a wealth tax on their citizens, but only three still have such a tax. In France, the wealth tax led to an “exodus of an estimated 42,000 millionaires between 2002 and 2012.” In 2020, President Emmanuel Macron repealed the tax. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the wealth tax, “was expensive to administer, it was hard on people with lots of assets but little cash, it distorted saving and investment decisions, it pushed the rich and their money out of the taxing countries—and, perhaps worst of all, it didn't raise much revenue.”
