US Government Money Scams

The “Mother of All” Government money scams was Social Security. Rather than having employees and employers deposit the employee’s retirement savings into individually owned accounts where employees could invest them in tax-sheltered accounts, this money goes to the US Federal Government General Fund for Congress to spend in real-time.  This is a Ponzi scheme. If we had been able to keep our own retirement funds, they would be worth triple the amounts we contributed and would be passed on to our families to grow family wealth and this is not what Karl Marx had in mind.

The US federal government has a habit of throwing money and laws at problems with little effect and often with “unintended consequences” that are worse than the problem government was pretending to fix. They usually don’t pass laws to fix problems until the problems are actually fixing themselves. Then they all take a bow. 

Foreseeing real problems is not their strong suit.  Most of the guys in Congress are retired “prosecutors”, so they prefer to spend all their “oversight” time attacking each other rather than automating the agencies.

These scams are not hard to see coming.  It starts with claims that something is a problem and gets covered in the press. Communist Non-profits pile on with protests to raise “awareness”. Legislators organize a “bandwagon” for everybody to jump on, which they do, because legislators want to look like they are addressing current issues. These scams are easy to pull off, because the US Congress gets by with ignoring the limits imposed in their “enumerated powers” enshrined in the US Constitution.

Some of these problems were obsessed in the press and are going away on their own, but the press doesn’t track the progress.  This makes secretly obsolete problems fair game for wasteful government spending and campaign contributor profiteering. 

Most of these problems were caused by government actions and legislation in the first place. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1993 required banks to give mortgage loans to unqualified borrowers and this caused the 2008 financial meltdown as these loans defaulted. This law has not been repealed, Congress never repeals these bad laws, Even if they are temporarily not enforced, they will return to do the same damage later.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader