by Dick McDonaldThe American salvation I speak of is not economic or social as America has no economic peer on the planet nor societal structure that delivers greater freedom to the individual. No America is doing fine irrespective of its nay Sayers and internal enemies. What I speak of is the fact that social and economic policies exist in the way we run the country that must be changed to elevate the status of individuals over that of the state. For too long policies rooted in socialist dogma have dominated the operation of our government and in turn created a bureaucracy that has sapped self-reliance from many of its citizen and made too many dependent on the state for their very existence.
We at the Ownership Society Institute have developed the Rise Up America plan to rectify those problems. The main goals of the plan are to make America and its citizens more productive and wealthy to the point every citizen can achieve the American Dream of financial independence even though they don't have a high level of education. It only requires that a citizen lead a stable and industrious life to achieve that dream. The plan also enables the economy to tap into the largest cache of new investment capital on the planet thereby funding the creation of more businesses and job opportunities for its citizens thereby accelerating its growth.
The key to making Rise Up America work is to change the fundamental method used to fund social programs like Social Security, Disability and Medicare. To improve the benefits paid under those social philosophies will require a change from the pay-as-you-go method of funding them to an investment and savings method wherein the forces of capitalism can be used to grow the personal savings investment for every American to enable him or her to retire affluently and pass on to their heirs a sizable estate.
To date the American public has been satisfied getting the small benefits presently paid under those programs and has been fearful of tampering with them in case those meager benefits are reduced further. The public also knows those programs are in financial jeopardy and have incurred enormous unfunded liabilities. Almost all young people question whether those programs will be available to them when they retire.
As the fear of losing the benefits of those programs is so acute in the minds of ordinary Americans, the Rise Up America plan has as its basic principle the continued payment of all of the benefits presently being paid under those programs for all years in the future to every American. In other words the benefits paid under Rise Up will never fall below those that are presently being paid. As most are aware the present plans to fix the insolvency of those programs is to raise taxes or cut benefits. The adoption of the Rise Up America plan will make such punitive actions unnecessary.
Forces alien to the improvement in the benefits paid by those programs have been successful in defeating any change by giving the word "privatization" a negative connotation in the minds of ordinary Americans. Those forces have tied the word "privatization" to the concept that these programs will be "destroyed" by privatization. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Under present Social Security law there is no investment, no nest egg at retirement after contributing 15.3% of the American worker's lifetime income into these programs. By privatizing the plan under Rise Up's plan the ordinary household in America would have accumulated a $3.2 million nest egg at retirement. Just the income off that nest egg would entitle the retiree to a $27,000 a-month retirement check which when compared to the $1,122 presently being paid only goes to illustrate the pathetic condition of the manner in which politicians have failed Americans in the past in funding these programs.
The Rise Up America plan does not use the word "privatization" to denote what that program is all about - it uses the word "personal account". The word "privatization" generally means taking a government function, transferring it to the private sector and letting the private sector make a profit on the activity. The Rise Up plan has no element of profit or the turning over of funds to any public or private agency. The amounts heretofore collected as payroll taxes are placed into the individuals own personal investment account and invested at their direction in large indexed stock funds which for the last 30 years have been growing at an annual rate of over 10%.
Opponents to any plan like Rise Up where individual Americans acquire wealth in sufficient amount to afford an affluent retirement and the best medical care on the planet out of their own funds make the deathbed claim that America can't afford to pay benefits under the old plan and direct all payroll taxes into personal accounts as well. Linear analysis would seem to give their objection some credence but the Rise Up America plan has as its transitional philosophy not only to pay benefits under the old plan while simultaneously directing all payroll taxes into personal accounts but by the method we suggest to affect this transition will also increase the international trading value of the U.S. dollar thereby helping Americans cure the most insidious tax of all - inflation. See the article "The Magic Transition" for a complete analysis of how that works.
It is not surprising that the opponents to a Rise Up plan are the very people in our society that claim to be the champions of the poor and underprivileged. They see continued poverty as their guarantee of continued political power. These people oversee the "entitlement industry" and dole out benefits in exchange for votes from the very people they are enslaving with their socialist policies. Rise Up is a capitalist's solution to poverty in our time - and that time is now.
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