{"id":4548,"date":"2011-09-16T14:58:48","date_gmt":"2011-09-16T21:58:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/2011\/09\/16\/legal-vs-illegal-ponzi-schemes\/"},"modified":"2011-09-16T12:05:35","modified_gmt":"2011-09-16T19:05:35","slug":"legal-vs-illegal-ponzi-schemes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/2011\/09\/16\/legal-vs-illegal-ponzi-schemes\/","title":{"rendered":"Legal vs. Illegal Ponzi Schemes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href='http:\/\/capnbob.us\/graphics\/imageview.php?image=http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/ponzi.jpg' title='ponzi.jpg'><img src='http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/ponzi.jpg' alt='ponzi.jpg' width='550' \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/patriotpost.us\/edition\/2011\/09\/16\/digest\/\">The Patriot Post<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Strictly speaking, Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme, in part because it&#8217;s not against the law. Indeed, it is the law. (Try not paying payroll taxes &#8212; i.e., &#8220;investing&#8221; in the system.) But it is structured exactly like a Ponzi scheme, and it will eventually fail for the same reasons. Today&#8217;s workers are paying for the checks of today&#8217;s retirees, and it has always been that way. From the start, politicians have raided the Social Security &#8220;trust fund&#8221; and spent the money on other general fund projects. What was left were worthless IOUs. Now that benefits paid exceed taxes collected, that problem has become acute. <strong>According to the Social Security board of trustees, in 1945, there were 42 workers for every retiree; the current ratio of three workers to every retiree is unsustainable.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Emphasis added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From The Patriot Post: Strictly speaking, Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme, in part because it&#8217;s not against the law. Indeed, it is the law.&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52,11,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beltway-kabuki","category-humor","category-whacko-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/capnbob.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}