Sometimes it's not as easy as a stupid Facebook graphic.

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Or maybe it is.  Anyway, a friend posted this:

And I tried to resist, but I couldn't:

Social Security is running out of money because it depends on you and me to pay the tax so our parents can receive their benefits, and our kids to pay the tax so that someday we can receive our benefits.  I think I read somewhere that when Social Security started paying out, there were 16 or more people working for every person receiving benefits.  Now there are something like 4.  And that number keeps dropping, and the tax burden on the shrinking number of people who are actually paying the tax keeps getting larger and larger.  That's why SS is running out of money -- it never had any to begin with, and there is no stomach in Washington to admit that it's a Ponzi scheme that's running out of people to scam and to find a way to terminate it and move people born after some date(x) to private pensions.  Eventually it will have to be terminated because, absent another baby boom or a massively stimulated economy that grows at a lot more than an anemic 2 or 3 percent per year, it simply can't be fixed.

Conversely, the welfare state is not running out of money because it is operated on the principle of redistribution of wealth, or as our President memorably put it, "You didn't build that", and "Sooner or later, you've made enough money".  In other words, you are a wrecker for daring to say that all the money you make from the sweat of your brow should belong to you, not some flea-bitten parasite on the body politic who probably drives a nicer car and has a bigger TV set than you do. The welfare state exists only because our congresscritters are too busy protecting their phoney-baloney jobs to do anything about dismantling it and forcing people to go out and make a living doing something productive instead of sitting around on their butts spending your money and mine.  In the meantime, Congress raises taxes on people who actually do productive work, borrow money from China to make up the difference, and print worthless fiat money to pay it out with while sticking the next generation with the bill.

Both programs amount to little more than generational theft.  Neither program actually solves the problem it claims to solve.

As Margaret Thatcher once famously put it, "The trouble with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money."  And Herbert Stein gave us the corollary, Stein's Law:  "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

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