Social Security Institute Blog
  As with so much Republican “outrage,” GOP indignation is misplaced and disingenuous.
Whether it is Republican “outrage” over Benghazi—outrage over Hillary’s dereliction of duty and the Obama Administration’s general incompetence—or the IRS’s targeting so-called “conservative” groups for harassment and persecution, the outrage never goes to the heart of the real issue. As with American politics generally, GOP “outrage” over IRS abuse or about the president’s imperial incompetence is superficial and distracting. In the case of Benghazi, the real issue is what the CIA is up to in Libya that provoked the attack and continues to fuel war and rebellion in other countries in and around the region, which the CIA and White House desperately are trying to cover up—almost certainly gunrunning to extremist Islamic rebels in Syria and beyond. Can you say "Watergate" and “Iran-Contra” Obama style? Can you say "impeachment?" Read More...
  Bravo! At last, a few courageous Republicans are bucking the White House and their own congressional leadership to oppose ill-advised cuts to Social Security. Reps. Sean Duffy (R-WI) and Phil Gingrey (R-GA) are actively opposing the Washington Establishment's efforts to chisel annual cost of living allowances (COLAs) that protect seniors against inflation. Read More...
 The problem of growing old was dealt with efficiently in human society for tens of thousands of years simply by incorporating older people into the family unit. When people got older they took care of the children while mothers and fathers hunted, gathered, etc. Later on, the solution was updated as societies modernized but the basics remained the same. The family unit remained intact and people aged within familial situations. It is only in the past century or so that a determined effort has been made to remove aging parents from the home under the guise that the "state" will care for them. This has caused a demographic and financial crisis that shows no signs of ending. Read More...
 (VIDEO) In an Interview last week with Stuart Varney on Fox Business Network’s Varney & Co., Judge Andrew Napolitano pointed out that Senator Rand Paul’s endorsement yesterday of the government’s using drones to kill suspected robbers is unequivocally not a change in Paul’s original position on drones. The only problem is, as the Judge pointed out, the Senator’s original position on drones was critically flawed, watered down and inadequate to begin with. Napolitano succinctly demonstrated why Paul’s 13-hour filibuster failed to go to the heart of the matter where drones are concerned. Read More...
 The CPI no longer is a tool to accurately measure inflation; it is an instrument of propaganda the government uses to hide accelerating inflation from the public and financial markets and to keep Social Security COLAs lower than they should be. Now they want to go to the Chained CPI, which will understate inflation even more. The true rate of inflation is probably somewhere between 7 and 10 percent right now, not the 1.5 percent officially measured by the CPI. Read More...
 It is time to close down the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and dismantle the affiliated national-security apparatus operating in the shadows (involving more than 30 separate federal agencies) that has grown up around it since 9/11. It is also time to rein in the CIA and reorganize the Federal Bureau of Investigation, shut down its proactive counterterrorism operations and revert the FBI to its former role as a reactive, domestic law-enforcement agency. Prophylactic government—PRECRIME—is antithetical to liberty and contrary to basic American values...AND it fails to make us safer. Read More...
A Promise Made Is A Debt Unpaid. Reneging on Congress’s Social Security promises by chiseling COLA payments through the Chained-CPA ruse would be every bit as devastating to the integrity and legitimacy of the United States Government as would reneging on interest or on principal repayment of the national debt held by the public. Which raises an interesting question: The principal on Treasury-Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) currently is adjusted for inflation using the CPI-U, not the CPI-W. Will the Chained-CPI also apply to TIPS, and if not, why not? If so, this switch would represent the first step in reneging on the full faith and credit of the United States Government. And if that is the case, which it indisputably would be, why isn’t it also a crack in the full faith and credit of the United States Government to go back on the promise—the debt—to seniors who faithfully and diligently paid their payroll taxes every payday expecting the government to make good on its promise? Read More...
 President Obama plans to limit how much an individual may save in their retirement accounts. The central planners in the US and most Western governments have and will decide how much is "enough" for you to have and if you manage to still have significant assets after that, they'll continue to whittle them away via taxation and inflation. It's all easily predictable as this is where things always go once things are socialized or collectivized. Read More...
 (REPRISE) With reports circulating all over Washington today that President Obama will go public this week with a proposal to cut Socia Security for CURRENT Social Security recipients, it is a good time to reprise warnings I have been issuing about Obama's secret agreement with Congress. If seniors don't wake up immediately, they will discover they've been had by the Washington politicians while they slept. Here is a warning I posted right after the last election: "Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner reiterated yesterday that the GOP is willing to push investors and the economy into the ditch by raising taxes if the Democrats agree to push old people off a cliff by cutting Social Security and other entitlemets." (Check back daily for reprise warnings from the past several years or go to Dr. Hunter's archive and browse through his blogs and op-eds.) Read More...
 ObamaCare was not supposed to affect seniors on Medicare but it does, and it already has started to squeeze Medicare, which in turn squeezes healthcare providers who in turn squeeze the medical care seniors receive by rationing, delayed treatment, substandard care and even outright denial of care. Read More...
 Republican Congressman Justin Amash is doing nothing here but glorifying the killers for the state and failing to recognize the coercive nature of Social Security. If less care was given to veterans (or no care), then maybe word would get out that joining the military was not such a great career move. At the same time, Social Security funds should be reimbursed to the people it was taken from, by liquidating government assets. Thus, from a libertarian perspective, Amash has things backwards. He is protecting the state at the expense of its subjects. Read More...
 American politics today is quite literally mindless. Think about it. Things have been tending that way for a long time, but in the last three decades a state of perfect mindlessness has prevailed. Of course, there has always been demagoguery, and at least since Martin Van Buren the predominant political parties have tended to avoid and obfuscate serious issues and stick to a vague and comfortable middle. But we have surely now reached a further stage in the collapse of meaningful self-government. Read More...
 In a recent communication, statistician John Williams of Shadowstats.com reports that the rigged official annual rate of consumer inflation (CPI) of 1.6% is in fact, as measured by the official US government methodology of 1990, 9.2%. In other words, the rate of inflation is 5.75 times greater than the reported rate. If Williams is correct, the interest rate on bonds is extremely negative. Read More...

(VIDEO) Jimmy Kimmel Asks People About Obama Pardoning The Sequester -- Sending It to Portugal
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 So, neo-clown Senator Lindsey Graham is offended, is he, by Rand Paul's asking President Obama, “Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” Offended? How hilarious. That’s like a Cardinal of the Catholic Church saying he is offended by the mother of a young son asking a priest, “Are you a pedophile?” Read More...
 Within our current political economy, a balanced budget could only ever mean stifling and overwhelming levels of taxation, which would even further serve to blight the economy. A true remedy to the condition of government debt is the elimination of its underlying incentives and root cause. It's time to free economic life from the burden of the Federal Reserve System, letting individuals' voluntary exchanges decide questions of money and credit. Read More...
 Too many conservartives ignore the sick-making dependency that is all too apparent to anyone living in Washington, D.C., and I don't just mean welfare. The capital's suburbs are full of some of the highest average incomes in the U.S. Sorry, but dependency on government isn't just the property of the poor; rather it's arguably bigger among middle and upper middle class earners fully reliant on a bloated federal budget. The political class that lives as a parasite off the rest of the country must grow up and shed it's addiction to public-sector lucre. War is not a jobs program, and government creates more problems that it solves. Read More...
 Even during this desultory economic recovery, one industry thrives — the manufacture of synthetic hysteria. It is, however, inaccurate to accuse the Hysteric in Chief of crying “Wolf!” about spending cuts under the sequester. He is actually crying “Hamster!” The sequester has forced liberals to clarify their conviction that whatever the government’s size is at any moment, it is the bare minimum necessary to forestall intolerable suffering. Read More...
 (VIDEO) The degradation of America resulting from police and military violence will not go on forever before a minority of people rebels against it. If the debasement is to be halted and reversed in time to prevent a rebellion from thrusting the country into internal warfare with itself, it will require people of the right—traditional conservatives and people of faith—to cease worshiping cops and soldiers, give up their dark romance with institutionalized violence and join with constitutionalists and libertarians to dismantle the welfare-warfare-police state before it is too late. Read More...
 (VIDEO) Judge Andrew Napolitano takes on NYC’s plan to round up mentally ill people who are not taking court-ordered medication. The NYPD is taking a new, "Pre-Crime" approach to trying to prevent future crimes by people who are not receiving court-ordered mental health treatment. The city has come up with a list of 25 such individuals and, if found, they will be forced to receive treatment. Read More...
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