Here's the one thing: Uncle Sam is not your kindly old uncle. He's just a crook who represents the exact opposite of everything the Founding Fathers stood for.
Washington and Franklin said that government is necessary, but it's evil and wants to control you. Yet under Woodrow Wilson, the Uncle Sam cartoon tried to get America to cozy up to government power.
Wilson was making the case that our uncle is only involved in our every day lives, because he cares about us and wants to protect us. It's much easier to talk about duty, sacrifice and obligation when you are thinking about a family member, as opposed to someone who is greedy and corrupt and wants to control you. It's kind of like Bernie Madoff. He was like a family member who everyone trusted. And people would tell their friends, "Yeah, he's a great guy."
But what did he do? Something called a Ponzi scheme.
What's that? Charles Ponzi was a guy who ripped people off in the 1920s who was so bad they named this thing after him. And he did what Madoff did. Madoff took money from some person and said he was investing it, but he really wasn't.
He was taking that money and giving it to other people that trusted him the month before. Like, "What a good month it was! Look at all this profit!" And then he just kept doing the same thing to new people until all the money dried up.
That's a Ponzi scheme. And if it sounds familiar, if we're really honest with each other, it has another name: Social Security.
Except instead of $50 billion, Social Security and Medicare is about $52 trillion until 2050. For years, the government has been taking it from you and your children to pay off your parents. As people get older, the scheme gets riskier and riskier.
And when you add in these stimulus packages, which heap on billions of dollars in welfare, new health care programs, state bailouts — like $42 billion for California — and pension guarantees...
Well, we all should have seen it coming. I think the tip-off should have been that Uncle Sam is wearing striped pants, like somebody who belongs in prison. Compared to Uncle Sam, Bernie Madoff is a rookie.
What do you think? Send your comments to: glennbeck@foxnews.com
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