Obama and McCain Offer Opinions on Social Security

YES, YES, Get congress OUT of it! They should not have access to our money! That is the first thing we need to do!

Bonnie Harrington of CA 7:06PM September 09, 2008

Fixing Social Security is easy; make it a real defined benefit pension plan instead of the fake Potemkin Village one it is now.

It has been called a Pay-As-You-Go defined benefit pension plan (DBPP), but there is no such thing.

All successful DBPPs are actuarially advance funded using an Actuarial Cost Method called The Entry Age Normal Cost method and all must have strong laws with teeth to protect the assets and the past service benefits from being cut back.

This funding method is the collective way to do it and DBPPs are the mirror opposite of Defined Contribution Savings Plans (DCSPs), such as the nearly ubiquitous 401(k) plan and have never worked as a retirement system for the vast majority of individuals and never will.

ERISA in 1974 tried to do this for private corporate DBPPs but failed miserably, which is why that entire industry has nearly collapsed. Fake actuaries, life insurance agents in disguise, ASPA members, began the process by lobbying Congress to make them Enrolled Actuaries. Congress was clueless as to who the real ones were.

Later, legitimate accredited actuaries, Fellows of the Society of Actuaries, and Members of the Academy of Actuaries made tons of dough on these flaws working with corporate clients and screwed tens of millions of plan participants out of more than a trillion dollars.

Pension consulting actuaries took advantage of these flaws on behalf of their clients, made tons of money—they were at one time the highest paid professionals on earth-- and now are crying in their beers over it's collapse.

Ironically and sadly, from 1917-1982 many independent pension consulting actuaries, including myself, had more to do with it's growth than any others and then, due to a combination of factors, but including greed and massive conflicts of interest, helped destroy their own cash cow beginning in 1982.

Amazing story!

I call it the Silent War and it is very much related to the much higher fees charged by the retail sector of the financial service industry—life insurance companies and stock brokerage firms-- as compared to the wholesale sale sector. These fees are easily 10 times higher and can get as high as 100 times.

At one time we were beating the hell out of them, but now they have made a major comeback.

It is also part of the destruction of corporate retiree medical plans, the attempt to privatize Social Security and the ongoing privatization of Medicare and the prevention of a decent affordable national health care system.

It should be obvious that we need to set aside monies long in advance of them being needed, invest the money, partly in private securities, like stocks, and use the returns compounded over time to pay the bulk of the benefits and this is also essential for Medicare and for that national health care system we so desperately need, along with Social Security.

Actuaries are one of the three major reasons we have never done it, despite them having invented the way to do this with roots as far back as 250 years ago.

The other two reasons are

· A bad federal accounting system—cash accounting—it was of the main reasons we had the 1929 stock market crash, until in 1934, Joseph P. Kennedy, FDR’s choice as the first SEC chairman forced the accounting profession to come up with a better way for all publicly held stock firms, which is accrual accounting, but it never found its way into the federal government, and

· Bad politicians, a few Democrats, but most of them Republicans who never liked these systems from day one and, when the public liked tem very much, then tried to get rid of the systems by privatizing them—a two-for-one—which would reward the retail sector with literally unnecessary trillions of dollars of commissions, fees and transaction costs.

Aside from Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys, and these Republican leaders, led by Mr. Bush, no other small group of people has ever done as much damage to so many people and gotten away with it for so long scot-free.

If elected, John McCain will continue Bush’s economic drivel and destruction of our democracy.

He will also appoint at least two members of The Supreme court and maybe three—and they will be just like Scalia and Thomas---along with thousands of other conservative judges, and that will be that for America. Hey, he would owe the radical religious right for getting him elected.

Racism may decide this election, unless journalists decide to vet Ms. Palin out, find out she has been lying through her teeth, and then ask her the right questions—but I am not exactly holding my breath. She will more likely get the super softballs that TV ‘journalists’ like Wolf Blitzer, like to ask.

Andy Lang of PA 8:20AM September 09, 2008