Saving? How?

So here's my puzzlement. The Republicans want us all to save for our retirement, rather than pay Social Security taxes. They claim that if we save for our retirement, we'll come out ahead.

Now, my question is: What kind of crack are these motherfuckers smoking?

See, here's the thing. I can put my money into a passbook savings account for at 0.8% interest -- at a time when producer prices are rising much faster, meaning that my money is actually losing value. Or I can put it into the gambling exchange oops stock market and earn an average of -1.8% over the past nine years since the stock market crash of 2001. Fuck, I'd be better off putting it under my mattress than doing that. Or... what?

The basic problem, savings-wise, is that us ordinary peons don't have access to the rigged markets that the wealthy use in order to transfer wealth from peons to, well, them. We can't buy foreclosed properties for cash to use as income properties the way the rich do because, well, we're not rich. We effectively have no real savings mechanism other than banks, and banks, well, they aren't exactly the most reliable or renumerative of mechanisms.

So why not use the government as our bank? Republicans are fond of saying that Social Security is a transfer program. I give up some of my current spending so that a retired person can spend. Yep, a transfer program. But: SAVINGS IS A TRANSFER PROGRAM TOO. If all retirement funding is via bank savings, I pay my funds into the bank, the bank then moves that money to retirees, and we're in exactly the same situation -- all that's happened is that a bank, rather than a government agency, moved the money. But yet it still moves.

So from an economic point of view, there is no (zero) difference between "saving" for retirment using a bank, and "saving" for a retirement via a government agency. Well, other than that using a bank or IRA or other such instruments gives the grifters who run our country more opportunities to steal our money, of course, as they did when they invested trillions of our dough in those bogus AAA-rated mortgage-backed securites that they *knew* were bogus because the price of housing had risen far beyond traditional rent-income ratios...

And that's the bottom line: Republican attacks upon Social Security are basically them trying to steal more of our money. Just what you'd expect from a political party that has become more corrupt than Democrats in their wildest dreams ever managed. (As an aside, how much do you bet that this asshole who put a No Negros Allowed sign in his business's window is a Republican?).

-- Badtux the "They're crooks" Penguin