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Letter: Government runs Ponzi scheme

By James Ault, Vancouver
Published: November 10, 2017, 6:00am

Ken Simpson’s letter (“Build trust, build society,” Our Readers’ Views, Nov. 3) about socialism and big government morality is incorrect.

Conservatives will not stop cashing our Social Security checks or burn our Medicare cards because we were forced by the coercive powers of the state to buy into an insurance plan that confiscated 12 percent of our income. We and our employers were heavily levied with the understanding that decades later we could draw upon those savings.

Instead, President Lyndon B. Johnson raided the safe to fund the Great Society and the Vietnam War, leaving Treasury bonds in place of our hard-earned cash.

Subsequent administrations bought votes by adding beneficiaries to the program without them paying the premiums. Only an entrenched big government could dream up such a Ponzi scheme that simple arithmetic and demographics would show to be unsustainable. Hard to find much morality in that.

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