Michael Swickard
“How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” – Abraham Lincoln
All recent presidents have known the truth about the way Congress manipulates money and makes decisions. Even though they have known the truth there has been and is no will to confront Congress for their fraudulent accounting. Both political parties are equally unable to call Congress out.
The political question that presidents confront is: How much truth will the public believe? Answer: The citizens will not believe the truth, so the presidents have decided that the public will not be told the truth since telling the truth to the public does not win races.
Example: Our country is taking in $2.2 trillion in revenue and spending somewhere about $3.6 trillion. That seems a huge problem and quite unsustainable. Some members of Congress say no, it is not a problem, and their opponents are trying to hurt Americans. It is good political speak and completely wrong. Consequently, many citizens say the same things and do not pay the slightest attention to the truth.
Does it make the amount of money our nation borrows and prints out of thin air any different? Does it change in the least the danger to our country if we remain on this financial path? No. It obscures the notion of best practices in the operation of government. It obliterates the truth of the situation our country faces.
Social Security defects
Many people, including myself, talk about Ronald Reagan as one of the best presidents. But in the middle of exceptional popularity and support he could not bring himself to tackle the Social Security defects. Likewise, while George W. Bush basked in approval following the 9/11 attacks, he gave lip service to the overhaul of Social Security but could not continue. What stopped both presidents from attempting to fix this program?
Both realized that telling the truth to the American public would not win and, therefore, truth was discarded. In a recent column I explained exactly the nature of the Social Security program defects. Money people all know these truths about the structure. But the reading public was less inclined to believe the truth because it did not fit their own desires for receiving Social Security.
In the weeks following that column I jousted with readers over the core of the Social Security argument, i.e. Social Security had the same structure as a Ponzi scheme in that money is not put into any saving and the payout depends upon the next generation continuing to fund the program with no certainty that a following generation would not pull the plug on the program before they, the subsequent generation, got anything.
I came to realize that most people would not accept that the trust fund was filled with unfunded debt instruments rather than bonds. No amount of data supporting the truth made any difference to these people.
Punting the ball to the next generation
I asked what I thought was the clincher: In August, President Obama announced that if the debt limit was not raised so the government could borrow more money, there may not be Social Security checks sent. If there really were trillions of dollars in the trust fund, why does our government have to borrow money? But I could get no traction with the people who continued with their denial that Social Society was unfunded.
In effect, those people who would not accept the truth just went on with their illusions. That was the answer to the odd behavior of Reagan. In his focus groups he came to realize that he could not win the argument about the true nature of Social Security. He would have expended all of his political capital to fix a problem that the majority of Americans would not believe was a problem. Sad to say he caved in to the political pressure and just punted the ball to the next generation.
This is why when Texas Governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry told the truth about Social Security, every other politician on both sides of the political aisle would not go there. Telling the truth to the public does not win races.
Swickard is co-host of the radio talk show News New Mexico, which airs from 6 to 9 a.m. Monday through Friday on KSNM-AM 570 in Las Cruces and throughout the state through streaming. His e-mail address is michael@swickard.com.