WreckRoom

This crook knows exactly why a billionaire pays the same as a man earning $184,500. He knows because he has voted for the cap and every patch on it for 35 years. Look at what the money buys. Pay the maximum for forty years and you collect about $4,200 a month at full retirement age. That is the ceiling, no matter how much was taken, because you own none of it. There is no account with your name on it, and Congress may change the terms whenever it likes. So call the arrangement by its name. It is a Ponzi scheme. Today's workers pay today's recipients. Nothing is invested. The trust fund holds Treasury IOUs, which means the government owes itself, and the only way to redeem one is to tax you a second time. Like every Ponzi, it survives on new entrants, and the birth rate stopped supplying them decades ago. Bernie has known this the whole time. Now the arithmetic he steps around. The 2026 Trustees Report puts the retirement fund's depletion in late 2032, six years from now, with an automatic 22 percent cut to every check. The federal debt crossed $40 trillion in August. Which is why the billionaires are suddenly needed in the pot. The scheme requires fresh money to pay the last round, and he has run out of workers to take it from. Then run his own numbers. Every billionaire in America, all 989 of them, holds about $8.4 trillion. Seize every dollar and you have covered a fifth of the debt, nothing of the deficit after that, and none of what is already owed to people who paid in. The fund still dies. And you would not be seizing dollars. That wealth is shares in Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, Berkshire, the same companies inside every 401(k) and pension in the country. Liquidate it and you crater the retirement savings of the people he claims to be rescuing, to buy a few years of a scheme that still collapses.