RJC4614

This crook knows exactly why a billionaire pays the same as a man earning $184,500. He knows because he has voted for the cap and every patch on it for 35 years. Look at what the money buys. Pay the maximum for forty years and you collect about $4,200 a month at full retirement age. That is the ceiling, no matter how much was taken, because you own none of it. There is no account with your name on it, and Congress may change the terms whenever it likes. So call the arrangement by its name. It is a Ponzi scheme. Today's workers pay today's recipients. Nothing is invested. The trust fund holds Treasury IOUs, which means the government owes itself, and the only way to redeem one is to tax you a second time. Like every Ponzi, it survives on new entrants, and the birth rate stopped supplying them decades ago. Bernie has known this the whole time. Now the arithmetic he steps around. The 2026 Trustees Report puts the retirement fund's depletion in late 2032, six years from now, with an automatic 22 percent cut to every check. The federal debt crossed $40 trillion in August. Which is why the billionaires are suddenly needed in the pot. The scheme requires fresh money to pay the last round, and he has run out of workers to take it from. Then run his own numbers. Every billionaire in America, all 989 of them, holds about $8.4 trillion. Seize every dollar and you have covered a fifth of the debt, nothing of the deficit after that, and none of what is already owed to people who paid in. The fund still dies. And you would not be seizing dollars. That wealth is shares in Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, Berkshire, the same companies inside every 401(k) and pension in the country. Liquidate it and you crater the retirement savings of the people he claims to be rescuing, to buy a few years of a scheme that still collapses.

Right on cue, Ro Khanna is ready to cash in, and the tell is his own example. He wants an agency to regulate AI the way we regulate nuclear power. We built that agency, and after Three Mile Island, which killed nobody, licensing froze American reactor construction for thirty years while coal smoke killed tens of thousands a year. That is what statism does. It cannot build anything, it can only forbid, and every year of forbidding is paid for in lives nobody counts, cheap power never generated, illnesses never traced back to the agency that caused them. And read what Coxon actually said. He described labs losing control of test systems and asked the industry to slow down. He did not ask for a cabinet department. Khanna took a technical warning about corporate incentives and converted it into a permanent licensing authority in Washington, as though the incentives of politicians were the cure for the incentives of engineers. Here is what nobody is saying out loud. Once a federal body approves which models may exist, you will never again trust an answer one gives you. Ask it about the Fed, about a bill's cost, about which policies produced which outcomes, and you will not know whether you have evidence or the approved position. The same government that shaped what history gets taught would get a review board for the tool people use to check history. This is the member who accused a private citizen of sentencing 4.5 million children to death off a projection, then demanded subpoenas. Fraud and sabotage are already illegal. Enforce that, and leave the men building the future alone.

The villain in this story is Senator Warren and people like her who refuse to think past their applause line. She admits it herself. There are not enough homes. Then she skips the only question that matters. Why? Zoning that bans apartments, permits that take years, rent controls that punish building. Every one a government policy she supports. The shortage is her movement's own construction project. And the greed theory fails arithmetic. If landlords raise rents just because they can, why couldn't they a decade ago? Greed is a constant. Supply is the variable. The landlord provides the home, carries the mortgage, fixes the refrigerator. Remove him and her constituent is not liberated. She is homeless.

You chose 1973 as your baseline. Let me tell you what happened in 1973. The dollar fully floated after Nixon severed gold. The first Pell Grants were awarded. The HMO Act was signed. Your chart does not start before the crisis, Bernie. It starts at the scene of the crime. Healthcare up 35x because Medicare, CON laws, and the AMA cartel run medicine. Homes up 13x because zoning makes building illegal and the Fed prints. Rent up 15x because price controls and zoning strangle supply. Tuition up 23x because federal loans gave colleges a blank check. General prices rose 7x in that span. Everything government controls rose 13x to 35x. Everything it leaves alone got cheaper. You are not the prosecutor of this case. You are the defendant.