RUSH: John in Crossville, Tennessee, you’re next, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: This makes my day. I’ve been with you for 20 years, and I’ve been through your cochlear implant, I’ve been through your drug problem, and I’ve prayed for you absolutely every day.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: And, Rush, I love you.
RUSH: I appreciate that. Thank you very much.
CALLER: Now I’ll get back to what I wanted to talk about.
RUSH: Oh, there was more? That’s a good place to —
CALLER: Oh, my gosh, I’ve got so much, I could fill up a whole program with you and listening to you for 20 years, and I love you. But getting back to what I was going to talk about, in 1958, when I got out of the military, I saw that Social Security was a problem, and I attempted to get out of that on my own. I tried with my employer, I tried with the government to get out of it. I was mandated. I was mandated to stick with Social Security.
RUSH: Everybody is. What did that tell you?
CALLER: That told me that they didn’t know what the hell they were doing.
RUSH: No. No, no, no. It shoulda told you that they knew exactly what they were doing. If Social Security were ever optional, if you could pull out of it and say, ‘I don’t like the deal, I’d rather save my own money and put it somewhere it’s going to happen to grow faster than it does with you guys,’ they would not let you do it. Our grandfather tried to give his Social Security checks back when he turned 65 or whenever. They wouldn’t even let him give the checks back, much less opt out of the program, because the purpose of Social Security from its inception was not Social Security. It was a tax increase, and it was designed politically to see to it that as many people would vote Democrat for as many years as possible. It was to create dependency. It was to create among as many people as possible total dependency on government for their retirement.
They couldn’t let people opt out of it for two reasons. One, they wouldn’t raise the money they needed to raise because we’ve gotten to the point now — and everybody knew this was going to happen — where people who are receiving Social Security are now getting money far beyond what they contributed. Right now, it takes the Social Security taxes of four workers to provide the benefits for one retiree, and that burden’s going to shift to three, and then to two. And in 30 years, you might have a tax rate of 70% just to support Social Security if they don’t change it. The second reason they didn’t let people opt out of it is because they knew that some people wouldn’t save on their own, and they retire with nothing and then they’ve got a problem and they used that, by the way, as a sales technique. Well, don’t worry about saving on your own, you probably have good intentions doing that, but if you don’t, then what are you going to do? And the threat was, if you’re not in a program, we can’t help you. It was a FDR brilliant move, actually, for the Democrat Party from the get-go.