http://commonsense2.com/2009/05/national-politics/why-is-social-security-going-broke/Why Is Social Security Going Broke?
by Stefan Kosikowski
Published: May 2009
<snip>Politicians and media pundits are so beholden to corporate America, they refuse to address the growing disparity between the wealthy and the rest of us. If one were to compare just the minimum wage from 1937 when it was instituted to today, our minimum wage would need to be around $20.00 per hour. This is a conservative figure too, for many economists say the figure needs to be closer to $30.00 per hour because they include skyrocketing food and energy costs. If you doubt this, consider the fact that a loaf of bread was three cents in 1937, a gallon of milk was ten cents; compare that to what you see the next time you go grocery shopping and remember that mass production of food today technically lowers costs as compared to that era! Diminishing real wages have been mitigated to a certain degree by easy and continuously expanding credit, but we learned just recently that this is no solution; sooner or later, the debt bubble will burst leaving the economy in a terrible state.
The second issue concerns the declining number of payrolls as a portion of the total population. Outsourcing has had a devastating impact that has yet to be accounted for. Over the past 20 years, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics reports that the net gain in total payrolls has increased by 26 million, which on the face of it sounds like a large figure. But over that same 20 year period, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the population of Americans between 18 and 65, working age, has increased by over 44 million. One has to wonder just who is supporting the other 18 million Americans who are not earning wages, ergo, not paying FICA taxes and putting pressure on Social Security? This is also why educated people should ignore the irrelevant distraction figure known as unemployment, which only counts workers qualifying for government benefits, and focus on the total number of payrolls nationwide to get a true picture of the health of our economy.
The third issue concerns the diminishing portion of our gross domestic product that is subject to taxation. This is why taxes of all sorts rise year after year, while the funding available for schools, for roads, for all the things we expect our governments to provide is shrinking. A good part of this is also from outsourcing manufacturing and service jobs, while still including the products and services as a part of the gross domestic product due to changes in federal law that allow bureaucrats to basically lie to us in claiming our economy is growing. They include these products and services because they are sold in America, ignoring their foreign sourcing. Using Arthur Anderson style accounting tricks such as transfer pricing, corporations claim little or no profit here in America and are not required to pay any taxes on the portion of profit they claim off shore.
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