Nick Chopiak – 3/16/11

This page was last updated on March 16, 2011.

Don’t blame Social Security for deficit; Nick Chopiak; Beaver County Times; March 16, 2011.

Previous letters from Mr. Chopiak about Socialist Security are here, here, and here. Other letters are here, here, here, here, and here. All the letters support Democrat/leftist positions.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.

“The beltway politicians created the national debt, and now they want to dismantle Social Security to pay for it.”

[RWC] Check the aforementioned letters and you’ll find Mr. Chopiak has been making erroneous comments about SS for nearly five years.

“Politicians claim everything is on the table. Social Security has run a surplus since it began, has a trust fund in the trillions and has never contributed to the deficit. It is not an entitlement; it is a contract with we, the people. This is our money.”

[RWC] Mr. Chopiak claims “Social Security … has a trust fund in the trillions,” yet in three previous letters he wrote of funds “siphoned from the Social Security trust fund.”

Remember, there never was a trust fund. By law, tax receipts in excess of benefit payments must be used to purchase federal debt (bonds). The same is true for Medicare. Other than what comes in via current taxes, all Medicare and Socialist Security taxes collected were spent a long time ago by the feds for other programs. The mythical Medicare and Socialist Security trust funds are nothing but IOUs issued over the years by a federal government with debt over $14 trillion and growing. There is no pot of gold, or dollar bills.

Mr. Chopiak claims SS “is not an entitlement … This is our money.” That’s not true. Medicare and Socialist Security are “pay as you go” income redistribution programs. That is, today’s Medicare and SS taxes pay for the benefits of today’s Medicare and SS benefit recipients. The Medicare and SS taxes he paid were not put into an account to pay for Mr. Chopiak’s retirement benefits. The Medicare and SS taxes Mr. Chopiak paid were used to pay for people collecting benefits while he was employed. Today’s Medicare and SS taxpayers are paying for Mr. Chopiak’s benefits, not Mr. Chopiak. This is the very definition of a Ponzi scheme and why both of these programs are in financial trouble.

As for “it is a contract with we, the people,” wrong again. As noted by the CATO Institute, SS benefits “are not guaranteed legally because workers have no contractual or property rights to any benefits whatsoever. In two landmark cases, Flemming v. Nestor and Helvering v. Davis, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Social Security taxes are not contributions or savings, but simply taxes, and that Social Security benefits are simply a government spending program, no different than, say, farm price supports. Congress and the president may change, reduce, or even eliminate benefits at any time.”