A reader shared with me an email he got from an acquaintance. It is a Social Security screed that is filled with half-baked ideas, exaggerations, and outright lies. The reader said he had never heard of these allegations before. But I pointed out to him that the harangue has been around for decades. Forty years ago, it was passed from one naive knucklehead to another by regular mail and by fax. Today, of course, it floats around in the online world. Sadly, thousands, if not millions, read it and believe it to be true. I’ve tackled the tirade in more than a few past columns. But I guess it’s time to do so again.
It starts out with a couple of paragraphs lambasting the government for calling Social Security checks “federal benefit payments.” The writer says that Social Security is not a “benefit.” He says: “It’s our money that we earned. How dare the government call it a benefit?”
