RUSH: You know, the president can sit there and praise FDR all he wants but he’s not fooling me. He may be fooling some of the liberals out there, but he’s not fooling me. I know full well what Social Security was for and the Democrats today confirm my knowledge. The purpose of Social Security — stop and think of this, folks. It all came about in the New Deal, when everything crashed and burned. Had it not been for the New Deal, would we have Social Security? And I know this is an “if” question and “if” is for children, but stop and think of what Social Security is. Social Security is said to be a retirement plan. Well, it never was portrayed as that, but it was portrayed as insurance in your retirement, the golden years, whatever. When it started out, it used people’s own money. They were taxed, and it’s a Ponzi scheme. The early recipients scored really huge. They contributed like 24 bucks and got $28,000 back. Today it’s just the opposite. You contribute $28,000; you’ll get $24 back of your own money. Everybody else will make up the difference. But still, what’s the concept?
The concept is that somewhere along the line, we’re going to start taxing your earnings, and we’re going to save that money for you so that when you can’t work anymore, that money gets given back to you from whom? The government. Who’s in charge of your retirement? The government is in charge of your retirement. Why didn’t somebody say at the outset, why didn’t FDR say at the outset, “You know what? This New Deal has taught us a lesson here. People need nest eggs.” You can lose everything overnight. You can lose your job, but if you have a nest egg, that’s some insurance against it, so we’re going to require a forced savings plan from every citizen. You’re going to have to take X amount of your paycheck and put it in an investment plan that you control, that you run, that you manage, it grows and grows and grows as time goes on. You can track the history of the stock market over the number of years we’re talking about. The stock market always goes up, never goes down. Number of years we’re talking about.
By the time you start working till you retire, the stock market is going to be up, guaranteed. No matter what period of time you look at. Now, why, all of a sudden, did somebody say, “No, we can’t do that. We’re going to bring this money to the government. We’re going to take this forced savings plan and we’re going to tax people and we’re going to take the money to the government, and then when they get 62 to 65, whatever it is–” and, by the way, when Social Security was first formed, nobody lived until retirement age, or very few did, so there weren’t that many payouts. This was a welfare program from the get-go. But more than that, it was a program designed to literally attach, with an almost umbilical cord, citizens to their government. Citizens would become dependent on the government for their retirement. Even though the citizen actually had to earn the money and have it taxed, the idea was Social Security is my government caring about me.
Now, the whole concept of this is something designed to empower government and make the citizens dependent. FDR was no schlock. He was no fool. And he was a Democrat. He tried to pack the Supreme Court. He was an ideologue. He knew what he was doing. In his mind, he was setting the Democratic Party up for 50 plus years of power and majority status. Because the more citizens you make dependent on the government, the more citizens that are always going to vote for you to keep it coming back. And, by the way, it didn’t stop with Social Security. Then we had all kinds of welfare programs and you know the rest. That’s why it’s taking a long time to turn this around and the reason why the president is determined on this, the reason why the president’s going to fix this, is because he knows what he’s up against. The Democrats, Social Security and the judges are the two things that scare them to death. If they lose the government control over Social Security, and if they loose the ability to institutionalize liberalism by way of activist judges inventing and writing law from the bench, if they lose those two things, they have lost two of the three legs of the stool on which they’re sitting. They may lose the whole stool. They may not be sitting on a stool when that happens. That’s why they’re scared. They’re not concerned about you when it comes to Social Security and they’re not concerned about you and your retirement. They’re not concerned about anything. If they were, the NAACP would be the first people supporting the president’s plan, but the NAACP is actively opposing it because they’re liberals. They’re big government types. They’re not out for the advancement of colored people.
Ask Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice if they’re out for the advancement of colored people. (Interruption) Yeah, look at Kweisi Mfume. They’re trying to shaft Kweisi now, right? Kweisi wants to run for the Senate in Maryland and somebody’s got some dirt on him that he showed favoritism with a female staffer, more than one, favoritism with a bunch of female staffers when he was running the NAALCP himself. So ask Kweisi if they’re for the advancement of — he ran the place and they’re trying to sabotage Kweisi. So all you have to do, folks, the president’s plan, individual retirement accounts, the plan announced last night, let’s really help the poor with it. My gosh, who is going to benefit more? The black population in this country has the lowest life expectancy. They don’t live as long. So they don’t get to retirement age. They pay all these taxes and Social Security. Some don’t live long enough to get all the benefits or even part of it. So the president wants to accelerate that. The NAACP, black caucus ought to be first in line supporting the plan if they really cared about black people and their economic circumstance, but, no, no, no, no. They’re big government types. They want the power of running the government.
If your agenda revolves around growing the government and controlling people with government, you need to control the government to do it, and they don’t, and that’s another reason for their panic. This whole Social Security thing was a wolf in sheep’s clothing from the beginning, but it’s been around as it is for all these years and all those years it’s sort of inculcated itself into people’s minds as some great government plan to guard people against poverty in their old age. There are so many better ways of doing that. If you’re going to tax people’s income all along their lives and put it in an account, let them run the account where it’s really going to grow and amount to something. But, oh, no, no, no. No we can’t have people in charge of their own retirement. We can’t have people in charge of their own success. We want the government and Democrats to be credited with the reason people have a retirement, and that’s why this fight’s going on. That’s why they oppose whatever the change the president offers. Anything that takes some of this money away from government and puts it in private hands, they’re going to oppose it.
Same thing with the judges. It’s really no more complicated than this, folks, and that’s why I say they’re corkscrewing themselves into quicksand because they’re on the precipice of losing all this and they’ve lost their number-one megaphone, the mainstream press, to continue this charade with people. So they’ve lost the ability to actually do all the mesmerizing and all the propagandizing and all the demagoguery. I mean they still have people out there doing it, but they’re not reaching as many people and there are counter-arguments waged all the time. So they’re in full-fledged panic about this. You can guarantee — any proposal that comes along, common sense proposal that empowers individuals in this country — you can count on liberal Democrats in this country opposing it in a screeching, childlike tantrum-type fashion, stamping their foot like Barbara Boxer and her kid.