Ep. 1852 - This Is The Greatest Scam In American History. It's Time To End It.

When a PhD student was investigating the state gambling industry in West Virginia, he made a pretty remarkable discovery. A grand total of 43 million bets were placed by just 16,000 gamblers using a single casino app in the span of one month. So a very small number of people are responsible for a staggering amount of betting, and interestingly enough, these bets spiked on specific days every second, third and fourth Wednesday of the month. Now, why might that be? You wouldn't expect Wednesdays to be a particularly big day for betting or for anything else, but consistently week after week, that's what the researcher observed. And then, after doing a little digging, he realized what was going on. Wednesdays are when social security payments go out, retirees were getting checks in the mail, and immediately putting the money into slot machines without even waiting a day. So they're just lighting the money on fire, essentially, and this is money that we desperately need as a country. Social security is the single biggest line item in the federal budget, and a major driver of our national debt. And we're distributing this money to millions of people who, in many cases, clearly don't need it. This is the kind of waste that, in any other context, would justifiably attract a lot of attention. When we learn that Somali daycare owners were buying luxury SUVs with our tax money, the vice president launched a fraud task force. The feds rated the leering centers. It was a national scandal as well. It should be. But the news that social security checks are fueling the gambling industry in states like West Virginia, one of the poorest states in the country, has been totally ignored. No one's even pretending to care about the implications. Now, if your response as well, these people paid into social security so they can spend the money however they want. Well, then you're missing two very important points. First of all, no, these people did not pay into anything. They paid a tax to the government, which then immediately spent their money, that the payouts they're receiving in the form of regular checks are coming from working taxpayers, many of whom need the money to survive, not to blow it on gambling. And secondly, on a related note, social security is unsustainable. The system depends on an ever-creasing number of workers who have to fund this Ponzi scheme with their tax payments for an increasingly elderly population. And yes, Social Security is quite literally a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment plan where older investors are paid out from money, collected from newer or more recent investors. And this is exactly how social security works. But there's a problem. Well, many problems, but this is a big one. Fertility rates in this country have plummeted. We don't have enough workers paying taxes and therefore the Social Security Trust Fund is set to run out in the fourth quarter of 2032. And once the reserve is exhausted, only around 78% of scheduled benefits would be provided. And if the government tries to solve the problem by printing money, it will cause inflation, which will ultimately cause Social Security distributions to rise even further since the benefits are adjusted based on the cost of living. In other words, whether you want to cut Social Security benefits or not, something has to give. At some point, sacrifices will have to be made. There's no getting around it. The only question is, who is making the sacrifice and in what form and when? According to a recent survey from the Cato Institute that's getting a lot of attention today, a large majority of boomers have decided on their preferred solution. They know who should make the sacrifice. And the answer is their children and their grandchildren. Listen to this. Quote, "In overwhelming 89% of Americans over the age of 65 said Social Security benefits should be protected at current levels, even if it means higher taxes on younger workers." And it's not only Americans age 65 plus who prefer the solution, roughly 84% of those aged 65 to 64 preferred higher taxes on younger Americans, while 74% between the ages of 45 and 54 agreed with it as well. In other words, the closer Americans get to retirement, the more likely they are to favor protecting today's benefits at the expense of younger workers who will end up paying higher taxes to keep it afloat. So that's the plan. They're going to steal from young families to pay the boomers who have dramatically more assets. The average boomer net worth is more than 10 times higher than the average net worth of somebody under the age of 35. The median boomer household net worth is roughly $430,000 while the median net worth of entire households under the age of 35 is around 39,000. Every single year, individual Social Security recipients are receiving around $20,000 on average, which is more than half of the household net worth for 35 year olds. And this is a very important point, so I'll repeat it. We are taking huge amounts of money from young families and giving it to older people who, on average, are 10 times wealthier. Now, of course, that's an average. There are plenty of elderly grandmothers who are poor or struggling, and there are some 35 year olds who are wealthy, but at a population level, the numbers are what they are. To have an overwhelming majority of people in the older richer group calling for tax hikes on the younger poorer group is just despicable, frankly. It's pure selfishness. Young families already have to deal with an economy where everything is exponentially more expensive than it was for boomers at the same age. Older people clamoring to raise taxes on the young on top of it all is just perverse. It's the exact opposite of how these things are supposed to work. Now personally, I would agree to a plan to say phase out Social Security over the next 25 years, even knowing that if we put that in place right now, it would mean that the system will end right at the moment when I would start drawing a check. The system is broken. It's not working. It's headed for the edge of a very tall cliff. Something has to be done for the sake of future generations. Again, sacrifices do have to be made by someone at some point. There's no way around it. And I would rather make the sacrifice myself than force my kids to make it. I would take the loss if it meant that my kids and grandchildren aren't subjected to this scam for their entire lives. I just can't for the life of me understand or relate to the older people who don't feel that way and wouldn't be willing to make the sacrifice for the sake of their descendants. It's a totally foreign mentality to me. I find it baffling. Setting my kids up for the future is one of the only things I care about anymore. I understand that for a lot of people, it can be a legitimate challenge to say for retirement on top of raising a family. But if the choice is between securing your own retirement and ensuring that your children have the chance to live in a stable country that isn't owned by China, how is that a choice at all? How would you decide when you've considered all your options that the appropriate solution is to raise taxes even further on young people, including your own kids? When you do everything in your power to make their lives easier if you had the opportunity to do so or maybe I should ask it this way. If you had to choose between making your life harder or your children's lives harder, is it not extremely easy to choose the former? Already so security by itself is an enormous burden on young people to degree that most people don't understand unless they're in this position right now. So let's break this down. If you're a young person making say 40 grand a year, which is a little bit under the average for someone who's 30 and not college educated, so a lot of people that are around this age are in this boat. If this is what you're making, you currently pay around 15.3% for the federal insurance contributions act tax or fight them. That breaks down to 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare. So in total, you're out $6,120 per year for FICA taxes. The employees personal contribution for Social Security is half of the total his employer if he has one covers the rest. So that means every year the employee with a $40,000 salary is paying $2,480 per year towards Social Security. That's basically a month's pay after taxes. It's a huge amount of money. Okay, this is not a small thing for a lot of young people. This is a major financial hardship for young families. It's potentially the difference between being able to afford a house or not. The difference between being able to pay off your credit card debt or not. The difference between getting a necessary car repair or not. Social Security is an incredibly significant financial burden for young working families. And all to prop up a system that almost certainly won't be there, at least in its current form, when they're older. And all to send checks to retirees who on average are much wealthier than they are and who, and this is important, are receiving much, much more from Social Security than they, quote, paid into it. On average, boomers will get paid more than double what they put in. And that's including inflation and interest in raw dollars. They're getting four to seven times what they put in. And the cost for young families, again, is real ongoing financial distress. You know, I can remember what that was like personally. Social security is no skin off my nose at this point in my life, but I remember very well being at an income level or being able to opt out would have been legitimately life-changing. And on top of that, the Social Security tax caps out after you've earned around $184,000. So high earners, people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or more, get to dodge Social Security tax on a significant percentage of their income. Meanwhile, we're making people earning 40 grand a year, pay around 6% from every paycheck. It's an insane system. You know, it's not fair. And the thing is, everybody knows it. When I made this argument on X, as you'd expect, I got a lot of replies like this one. This is from a guy who, and I know it sounds cliché, but I'm not making this up, has golf clubs in his profile picture and the words real estate in his ex-handle. Here's what he says, "FU, they made us pay into that system for this guarantee of retirement pay. I would have rather invested the money in the stock market and I'd be much better off." Well, there are a few problems here. First of all, nobody stopped you from investing in the stock market. If you never did that at any point in your life, that's on you. If we're going to lecture younger people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and take responsibility for their own choices, fine, but then the same tough love mentality should certainly be applied to adults twice their age. So if you're sitting here saying, "Oh, I didn't invest in the stock market for my entire life." Well, you could have, whose choice was that? I mean, how's it any different from a young person who's complaining that, "Oh, I have terrible student loans?" And most older people, especially if their Republicans will look at the other people say, "Well, you know, sorry, that was your choice." And I grew with them, by the way, like, you know, sorry, I know it's tough, but you took that debt out and that's on you. I mean, if we're willing to say that to young people who made a choice when they were like 18, to take on a, you know, what would choose, what would turn out to be a really bad investment of a college education for most of them. If we're willing to look at them and say, "Well, you know, sorry, tough luck." Then what's wrong with saying that to someone who's 67 years old, a grown ass adult who's saying, "Well, but I never invested any money." That's exactly what you would say to someone half your age and do say, "What's the difference?" Second, if you admit that it's a crappy system, then you should want nothing more than to fix it for the sake of your descendants. But instead, you know, it sounds like you want to get whatever you can out of it and leave your grandchildren holding the bag. And meanwhile, your generation spent decades voting exclusively for politicians who would prop up the very, quote, "system" that you're now complaining about, again, where does personal responsibility factor in here? There was also this response, which was less vulgar, but still outlandish in its own way. And I'm reading this because it's fairly representative of the kinds of feedback you get anytime you try to talk about solving the social security problem. Anytime you try to even broach the subject, you get hissy fits. You get temper tantrums from grown people. That's what you get, and that's what this is. Usually I agree with you, and I'm a staunch Republican, but if you take away my social security, I'm a Democrat for the rest for the first time in my life. I spent my entire life planning for retirement with social security, a major part of it, and paid into the systems as a young person, so the older generation could have some support. I'll make a deal with you, pay me back every penny I put into it and every penny my employers put into it on my behalf at 5% interest and you can take away the monthly checks. Okay. So he's willing to make a deal as long as the deal involves paying him all of his benefits. This is the extent to which many older people are willing to offer concessions of social security. They'll make a deal as long as the deal involves giving them everything they want up front and making sure they have to sacrifice not one single dime, even while 89% of them are saying absolutely, I think younger people should have to sacrifice their money. It's just a morally abhorrent position, I'm sorry, it just is. And if they don't get what they want, as you just heard, they'll vote for communists who want to burn down the country, that their grandchildren will have to inherit. Who are you punishing? You're going to punish your own descendants. You're going to elect terrorists who plan to open the borders, release all the criminals and destroy the United States as we know it, solely to protect your retirement. This is childish and petulant and outrageously selfish, demanding that the government steal from young people the way it stole from you. I mean, admitting that it's theft, that they took from me. So they got to take from these kids, spreading to destroy everything if they don't do that. It's such an abhorrent position that I'm surprised people aren't too embarrassed to say it publicly, but this is a common sentiment. You know, according to this guy, he spent his entire life planning for retirement with Social Security as a major part of it, and to be fair, you know, there are probably many people in that vote. I get it. This is where I go back to the younger people who have college debt. Yeah, you're in a tough spot. I get it. Like, that was a mistake, though. You should not have planned your whole retirement around a government program. Okay, that was a mistake. You shouldn't have done that. It was a very foolish decision. There was never any guarantee that Social Security would remain solvent for any significant period of time. Everyone knew it was a government program administered by incompetent government bureaucrats. And no matter how much you paid into the system, you were never allowed to log into any account and see your balance. That should have been your first clue. Okay, that was your big clue that, in fact, you had not paid into anything. Your money was gone. And the moment you realized that, you should have started planning for your retirement on your own without depending in any way on Social Security. And before you start ranting, that it's unfair, I agree, but this is exactly the position that young people today are in. They are having their money taken from them for a system that they know probably won't be there for them. And that if you're an older person, you also know, you damn well, though, that this probably won't be here for the younger people, but you're not going to be around when that happens. And so younger people, they know that they have to plan for their retirement separately. How can you expect young people to do that for themselves while at the same time getting angry when younger people ask you why you didn't do that for yourself? And if you did do that for yourself, well, then again, why should younger people be forced to finance a retirement that you already financed? Now, yes, it's wrong for the government to steal your money and give you an I/O/U in return, which is basically what Social Security is, but that's what happened. That's what happened. And if you pretended otherwise, then you made a very serious mistake. The question is who should have to pay for that mistake? Should a young worker making 40 grand a year have to pay for it for your mistake? And when you consider that collectively, the older generation spent many decades voting exclusively for politicians who would prop up this failing system, it becomes hard to see them as a victim of it. You could have fixed the problem or at least tried to fix it, but you didn't. You didn't even try. I mean, in fact, like for decades, if any politician has even mentioned a word about making any changes to the system, you screamed at them and voted them out of office or threatened to. When you own a home, you must know that eventually something expensive is going to break. You don't know what it'll be and you don't know when it will happen. Maybe the water heater goes out. Maybe the furnace decides that the coldest day of the year is the ideal time to stop functioning. I think it's crucial to have a plan for that before you're standing in your house with no hot water, desperately calling repair companies and discovering exactly how expensive home ownership can become. That's why homeowners should know about home-serve. Home-serve offers, home protection plans for different systems in your house, including options for things like plumbing, heating, electrical systems, and water heaters. Regular homeowners' insurance often doesn't cover the normal wear and tear that can lead to these kinds of breakdowns. Plans started just $4.99 a month. You choose the plan that fits your needs and budget, and if something covered by that plan goes wrong, you can call the 24/7 hotline to start the repair process and this isn't some obscure service. Home-serve has nearly 4.5 million customers, a 4.7 out of 5 rating on trust pilot at an A plus, a better business bureau rating. The point is simple. You already know that owning a house comes with unexpected repairs, you can either prepare for that fact now, or wait until something breaks and prepare for it while water is pouring through your ceiling while I prefer the first approach. Your next costly home repair could be coming, act now and get protected before a breakdown with a plan through home-serve. For 50% less, your first year go to home-serve.com/walls to find the plan that's right for you. It's home-serve.com/walls for 50% less, savings compared to renewal price, void, and floor. Listen up, there are enough people listening to this show right now that if they don't vote, it could swing key states in the 2026 election to the Democrats and everyone listening knows. Every single ultra-far-left Democrat socialist will be showing up to vote this fall. Democrats are fired up and we can't let them win because if we lose, they'll undo everything our movement has fought for. I need you to vote early so that you can bank your vote and fight back against the left's turnout machine. If you live in the critical Senate battleground states of Maine or Ohio, early voting is already underway starting this week. Go to GOPvotes.org right now and find out when you can vote. Making your voice heard is easier than ever. You can get election reminders. Look up your polling location and pick a date to vote early. Go to GOPvotes.org today paid for by SLF PAC not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. As a practical political matter, I'll concede that it's extremely unlikely burging on impossible that either party is ever going to reform Social Security much less end it which is what needs to happen. It's not going to happen. I know that. This is a political dead end for exactly the reason that this guy states there's a substantial number of people who will vote against any political party that touches Social Security in any way. We're not just talking about ending it. Any attempt to reform it at all to make it potentially solvent or to make it so that it will still be around maybe decades from now. Any attempt to do that is met with fury, right? retirees become like BLM like it's like we're just going to burn everything down. Even if we're hurting our own kids, we're going to do it. With George W. Bush tried to privatize the system. It was a political disaster that was shot down within 60 days, but his proposal was highly sensible and actually pretty moderate all things considered. He didn't want to shut down Social Security altogether at all. What Bush wanted to do was allow younger workers to divert 4% of their payroll taxes from Social Security and into an individual personal account that they controlled. The personal account would work like a 401k. You could choose from a limited number of investments, mostly tracking the total stock market. In exchange, the workers guaranteed Social Security benefits, which are invested in Treasury securities with a much smaller return, would be reduced proportionally. Meanwhile, the government would have to borrow around $2 trillion over 10 years to make up for the shortfall of money going into Social Security through normal contributions. That seemed shockingly high to people at the time, but now we routinely run deficits of that size every single year. Assuming the stock market account grew in a rate of inflation, plus 3%, workers would benefit from this new system. Otherwise, if the market's underperformed, it would cost them money in retirement. Here's how he tried to sell the plan to the public all the way back over 20 years ago. Listen. The government has made a commitment and you have made your plans. These promises will be honored. George Bush's plan strengthens Social Security. It guarantees everyone at or near retirement every dollar of their benefits, no cuts in Social Security, and the Bush plan gives younger workers the choice to put a small part of their Social Security in sound investments they control for higher return. This generation will save Social Security. Now that was right before Hurricane Katrina hit, which distracted everyone and killed the proposal for good, but there was no chance it was going to succeed anyway. The unions and the AARP opposed it mainly because their members didn't understand how the stock market worked, and Bush's poll numbers began to tank as Democrats convinced seniors that they lose all their money, so the program never even made it to a congressional though. This is one of the reasons everyone talks about we need real solutions. Look at some of the reasons why real solutions don't happen, because on the rare occasion where anyone in a position of power actually proposes something that might be some kind of solution, might have some kind of, you know, effect on a major problem, like they get, they get screamed out of the room. That's what happens. And Bush shifted his focus to Hurricane Katrina, and no one talked about the proposal ever again. That's too bad because it's very clear that workers would have much more money for retirement today if this proposal had passed, and crucially, that's money that they would actually own. You know, imagine a worker in his 20s making 40 grand a year who began participating in Bush's program and it became available in 2005, if it ever did. The market crashed in 2008, and then it recovered a few years later and went on a 15 year bull run. With Social Security alone, he'd get a check for around 2500 a month when he retired. Under Bush's system, his monthly Social Security check would be reduced to around 2000 a month, but he'd have something like 300 grand in a personal retirement account that he controls. That's a massively better position to be, and it's a better system. We could have had that system. You know, but the massive voters at the time, who had especially older people retired people didn't want it, wouldn't have it, wouldn't even consider it. You know, and if you were in that position, you could safely withdraw 4% from their retirement account every year, which more than makes up the difference in Social Security payments, and the kicker is that when he dies, he can pass that money to his family. It's generational well. On the other hand, when you die, all of the money you supposedly paid in to Social Security is gone forever. Your spouse can collect your benefit until they die, but after that, no one will ever get that money. It's just gone. It's just gone because it's already gone, because you never actually paid into anything in the first place. And again, Bush's plan was very modest. You could only put 4% in a private account, and only with certain restrictions. If people were simply allowed to put all of their Social Security tax, including in player match, into a retirement account, which is obviously what the system should be, starting at age 18 and retiring at 65, then they'd retire with around three million dollars based on historical market returns. Pretty much everybody with a job would be a millionaire. It's astonishing to think about, but it's true. These better ideas and better systems were available and had been proposed before Bush and since, but boomers nearly unanimously opposed all of them, which is why again, it's a little hard to stomach the claim that they were scammed by the system. And now we have to keep it intact so they get paid out because, you know, fair is fair. Yeah, they were scammed, scammed, sure, but for the most part, they categorically opposed any effort at all to fix the scam. Bush's doom Social Security reform was merely a last edge effort to fix a problem that boomers and the predecessors created over a period of many years. This is something, you know, people don't talk about anymore, but it's important to go into some detail here so that you fully understand how older generations have sabotaged the economic prospects of young people in this country and why they did it. This is not, I know when we talk about this, it's, oh, you're generational warfare. It's not generational warfare. It's just history, okay? This is what actually happened. And when you see that, you'll see why it's necessary to take decisive action to reverse the damage that they've done. But we can't do that unless we're willing to talk about the damage was and I'm sorry if that's, you know, if that's going to be offensive to some people, but that's just, that's just it. I'm sorry. Some really, really terrible decisions were made and in fact, these were decisions that were made by, you know, not made by young people today, they weren't around for it. A lot of young people are making their own bad decisions, but not these. Finding a T-shirt that looks good feels well made and doesn't cost a car payment is harder than it should be. Somewhere along the way, shirts became either $12 and see through F2 washes or $90 and sold by a guy who calls it a capsule. My producer got tired of that and found Mac Weldon after listening to this show. They make a classic menswear that looks good without being flashier complicated. Their air knit X collection falls that same philosophy breathable nylon mesh with four-way stretch. So it moves with with you without bunching, sagging or feeling restrictive. It's lightweight, moisture wicking and odor fighting, but still looks like regular well made clothing. They've got air knit X and T-shirts, polos, undershirts, socks and more. And if you need something with sleeves and buttons, their tech linen button up is breathable and wrinkle resistant with a relaxed fit so you can skip the ironing. It's all made for guys who want to stay comfortable all day and still look presentable without putting any more thought into getting dressed and absolutely necessary. Go to Mac Weldon.com and get 20% off your first order of $125 or more promo code walls. That's m-a-c-k-w-e-l-d-o-n.com. Code Walsh. When you're a kid and somebody asks what you want to be when you grow up, you just say something astronaut, vet, professional, dinosaur maybe. Nobody checks your qualifications. It's the one truly free market of ambition. Well, at some point that turns into an actual decision and a lot of people just never finish making it. If there's a version of that old plan, still sitting in the back of your mind, Grand Canyon University has online undergraduate programs in nursing, business, education and technology. The grown up version of whatever you said you wanted to be back then, they build their program around the free market along with a Christian worldview and open discourse and they back it up with real scholarship and financial aid. So a private education doesn't have to be out of reach. Whether you're starting college or going back after years away, GCU is built to help you get there and figure out what your purpose is while you're at it. At seven, nobody checks your qualifications, but at GCU, they help you earn them. They say higher education is outdated, irrelevant, but at Grand Canyon University, they don't settle for the status quo, they shatter it. GCU's accredited MBA program is 100 percent online, is designed to shape leaders through servant leadership. GCU can help you take your passion and scale your business to serve your community. This is Purpose Driven Education. Take action, find your purpose. Grand Canyon University, visit gcu.edu. Okay, so in the 1960s at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, LBJ's great society and "war on poverty" A creative massive entitlement programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, which provided health care to the elderly and the poor respectively. The SNAP or food stamp program is also created along with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funneled billions of dollars towards public housing, rental assistance vouchers, and so on. Then there was the massive expansion of the public sector, where the government went out of its way to create jobs for black workers from the postal servers, to the DMV, to the transit system, to those unmarked government office buildings where you wonder what anyone does there, the answer is they don't do anything. All of this was on top of Social Security, which was created decades earlier. Now, none of this happened. We would not have any national debt today. We'd have a massive government surplus. We would have saved trillions of dollars every few years, going back decades and on top of that. We wouldn't have had to make any interest payments on our debt, which we have compounded for so long that these interest payments now exceed our annual defense budget. What does this mean in practice? Well, with a massive national surplus, we could have eliminated or reduced income and payroll taxes for most Americans. We could have done that. We could have no income tax. We could have issued an annual dividend to everyone to make it easier to buy a home or start a business. We could have invested in our own country to an unprecedented degree, but in the name of civil rights and attempting to integrate black Americans with the rest of society, and the interests of, you know, waging a quote unquote war on poverty, LBJ and the Democrats created all these massive programs, and here's the key point. When the opposition party, quote unquote, took over instead of scaling these programs back or finding some way to pay for them, namely by raising taxes, if you're going to keep them and pay for them, that's the only way to do it. They kept everything intact. Ronald Reagan won landslide victories by promising tax cuts without any meaningful reduction in government spending on all of these welfare programs. We explicitly promised to keep the social safety net for the elderly, and the boomers were thrilled. They got more money in their paychecks, and in the immediate aftermath, all of the major economic indicators turned positive for a time. This was Reagan in 1985 taking a very premature victory lap. In 1981, our critics charged that letting you keep more of your earnings would trigger an inflationary explosion, send interest rates soaring, and destroy our economy. Well, we cut your tax rates anyway by nearly 25 percent. And what that helped trigger was falling inflation, falling interest rates, and the strongest economic expansion in 30 years. Now what Reagan doesn't mention here is that by 1985, federal receipts had dropped to 17.2 percent of GDP compared to 19 percent in 1981, so the government was taking in much less money relative to the size of the economy, and meanwhile, federal spending was going up, creating a very large deficit of 5 percent of GDP. So our economy was expanding, and the federal government was still running a huge deficit. The budget was not remotely balanced, and then just one year later, Reagan poured gas on the fire, signing an amnesty bill that granted a pathway to legal status for millions of illegal aliens. He claimed to have ultimately reduced illegal migration, but of course it accomplished the exact opposite result. Foreigners realized the U.S. government would reward them for invading our country that we didn't have the willpower to deport them. So in just a few years, a low-income Mexicans took over large portions of California, which as a result will never again elect a Republican like Ronald Reagan. In addition to permanently changing the landscape of American politics, this demographic transformation put millions more people on our welfare roles, and the deficit continued to grow. Ronald Reagan would then become, of course, deified by future generations of Republicans and discussed among conservatives with the same reverence we have for George Washington. Even though the fact is he helped to bankrupt the country and he kickstarted the illegal immigration crisis that has destroyed countless lives. As Christopher Caldwell writes in his book The Age of Entitlement, quote, "From an actuarial and from a human capital perspective, the quarter century after Ronald Reagan's election should have been the easiest time to balance the budget in a history of the problem." The entirety of the vast baby boom generation, making up 38% of population, was in its productive years that were relatively few retirees and dependent children to tend to. The country was until the Iraq War after 2003 at peace. It set the rules for the global economy, but since baby boomers were due to leave the workforce between 20 and 2030, big obligations for Social Security and Medicare loomed, these would go unmet. Instead of meeting those obligations, the boomers and Reagan Republicans chose the path at least resistance. Quote, "The borrowing party power of the baby boom generation was invested in avoiding the choices that the confrontations of the 1960s had placed before the country. We should understand the great society as the institutional form into which these civil rights impulse hardened. They transfer from whites to blacks of the resources necessary to make the segregation viable. The segregation was the most massive undertaking of any kind of the history of the United States, like any massive undertaking required endurance, patience and prohibitive expense. Almost everyone who did not benefit from it was going to be made poor by it. The best evidence we have is that it was too much for most Americans from beginning. The rhetoric that brought Reagan to landslides was, among other things, a sign that Americans were unwilling to bankroll with their taxes, the civil rights and welfare revolution, of the 1960s and the social change it brought in its train." Well, the boomers simply enacted tax cuts without cutting entitlements and government spending. The tax cuts, called well rights, provided a golden parachute for the white middle class allowing it for one deluded generation to recreate with private resources a potemkin version of the old order. Now, well, people who weren't even born when these decisions were being made now have to pay for those decisions. This is generational theft at scale. But by 1989, the year Reagan left office, according to an estimate by the economist Roy H. Webb of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, the government's unfunded liabilities, mostly for Social Security, Medicare and Veterans benefits, had reached $4.4 to $4 to $5, I should say, trillion dollars, and would rise exponentially if nothing were done. Nothing was done. By the time of the 2016 election, a calculation of those liabilities, similar to Webb's, ran to at least $135 trillion dollars. Ten years later, some estimates pegged those liabilities at over $200 trillion. And while no politician wants to talk about a solution to this problem, because it would destroy their political future, I'm not running for office. So here's the truth. A lot of the online boomer hate is cliched and undeserved, hating or scapegoating an entire generation is a ridiculous practice and certainly unhelpful. There are plenty of boomers who are great people. My parents are boomers. They're great people, but that doesn't change the fact that taking huge chunks out of the paychecks of young working Americans in order to pay for the retirements of older Americans who have a net worth several times higher and who elected the politicians who bankrupted the country, all to prop up a system that everyone knows likely won't be there when those younger people are retirement age themselves is morally abhorrent and economically insane. Everyone knows it, but we're held hostage by elderly politicians who refuse to surrender power and older voters who as a group with exceptions, obviously simply don't care enough about the financial and cultural future their grandchildren won't hear it. And here's the other truth that I mentioned before, but I'm going to reiterate, on average, boomers are getting paid more from Social Security than they ever, quote, paid into it a lot more like double and that's counting inflation and interest in particular low earners and couples with only one breadwinner receive benefits that are many times greater than their contributions via taxes and raw dollars, they'll get, again, four to seven times what they paid in. And if they're married with spouses who never work today in their lives or paid any payroll taxes at all, those spouses are getting up to 50 percent of the benefit as well. And all the while, younger workers who cannot afford to keep this system afloat are being forced to do so anyway, even as they struggle to afford what should be the basic features of life in the most powerful country in the world, features like a house and a little bit of a property in a car. So we have a problem, a massive problem, something has to be done. We have to start somewhere. And here's one compromise that would at least stave off in solvency and save billions. What if you get back what you paid in, quote, unquote, but no more, young struggling families will not be forced to finance a 250 percent return on your, quote, investment, and that seems reasonable, doesn't it? I mean, it doesn't go nearly as far as I would like, but it's a compromise, a fair compromise and negates any claim that you didn't get the money back that you, quote, unquote, paid in. And it will resolve the most pressing problem, which is that we are running out of money, not just for Social Security, but for everything. And yet I suspect that this compromise will not be satisfactory. Why is that? Well, because this debate actually has nothing to do with getting back what you paid in. The real demand is for a lot more than that. As that poll from Cato demonstrates, the real demand for many older, on average, wealthier Americans is to extract as many resources as they can, even if those resources come from young people who cannot afford to pay anymore. What's so insidious about entitlements is that no one ever, under any circumstances, wants to give them up ever. And Social Security is no exception. But at the risk of disappointing the folks who have, you know, made casinos very happy on Wednesdays, the unavoidable fact as that sooner or later, this particular entitlement will come to an end. Will, it has to. The only choice now is whether it ends in financial disaster for the entire country or in a deliberate phased wine down that gives your children the same opportunity you had, which is the chance to save money, buy a home and start a family that one day will do the honorable thing and pass its wealth down to the next generation. I'll do it for the show day. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow of a great day. Godspeed. Every significant movement in history has started with protesting. How are you? It's Uncle Tom. This is our generation civil rights. I have no idea what the protest is about. Bingo, given the current climate, should have figured as polarizing as late Saunders. He will be allowed on campus. Can you hear me okay? Saunders is a close personal friend of Chancellor Freeman. This is a decision I cannot find. Islam will conquer the West. Are we paying attention? They've taken over the building, they're downstairs and they've blocked the doors. I seek forgiveness from Allah, the Almighty. We cannot run and hide. Muhammad is the messenger of God. There is no God but Allah. What do you say? We turn those vessel bees into a fine red mist. As we move, one man will cover while the other guys go. They call that leapfrog. Stretch your mouth and listen. You need a course in safe weapons handling.