Our social security system is a ponzi scheme. People get paid off when they retire far more money than they have invested.
How does the government do it? By taxing the people coming into the work force to pay off those retiring. It is a ponzi scheme.
When President Bush tried to do something about it, the Democrats rebelled. They wouldn’t even touch the retirement age. They said everything is fine. In essence, the Democrats said America’s Social Security Ponzi scheme is fine.
This was the topic on hour two of Dennis Prager’s radio show today.
Prager said he has little interest in corruption and little interest in scandal but he finds himself riveted by this Bernie Madoff story because for decades this guy fooled almost everybody.
What lesson can we learn? That there are con men who can con almost anybody. Most people have good antenae for fraud but some people can look you in the eye and lie and you won’t realize it.
Dennis says he’s been hurt by the economic downturn, that he bought his home at the height of Southern California’s real estate bubble (2005?) and it has now lost much of its value.
NB posts: I am framing and posting this in the men’s room next to the trading room, so that the Young Turks regain some sense of connection to the source of all the capital they are flinging around the Great Casino That Is Wall Street. They have lost all sense of their fiduciary responsibility to widows, orphans and charities, and think they are all trading "proprietary capital" of the firm that has magically fallen from heaven, pays them enormous income and bonuses when they bet correctly on Red, and conveniently provides a job down the street at JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs when it occasionally goes wrong and they need a new job — particularly when their losses occurred "concurrently to everyone elses", which has already become the new Wall Street marketing buzz phrase for 2009.
