The most obvious way Social Security is like a pension plan is that the rich are trying to destroy it, just like Hostess Brands wrecked the retirement plans of its bakers. But there are other similarities. Since 1983, we have all paid in a lot more money in FICA taxes than needed to fund current payments on the theory that it would be there for baby boomers when it was needed.

“That is, we can’t have a Social Security crisis without a general fiscal crisis – unless Congress declares that debts to foreign bondholders must be honored, but that promises to older Americans, who have spent most of their working lives paying extra payroll taxes to build up the trust fund, don’t count.”

Social Security is one of those topics that most people think they know about. Everyone“knows” Social Security is “going bankrupt,” that the government “raided the trust fund,” and that “it won’t be there when we retire.” These folks include both the ideologues determined to dismember the program and the casual consumers of mainstream media, which has been largely content to write he-said, she-said stories giving equal weight to the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration and“experts” wearing tin-foil hats.

But there’s a potentially more dangerous cohort than the Fox-educated crowd out there, says Eric Laursen.

You know things are bad when Paul Craig Roberts, one of the founders of Reaganomics, says about deregulation and the current state of the economy:

It’s gone too far.

With Heist: Who Stole the American Dream, directors Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher trace the roots of today’s current economic crisis back to a 1971 memorandum written by Lewis F. Powell Jr.– a Virginia lawyer and representative of the tobacco industry who later became an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. The Powell Memo, written for the Chamber of Commerce, lays out a very solid, point by point plan for corporations to loosen regulations and gain greater and greater control of the economy for their own benefit at the expense of of the American people.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, generally sides with the Right, but it has long shown an independent streak, sometimes bucking conservative orthodoxy on civil liberties, the war on drugs, and U.S. militarism. Will that change if Charles and David Koch succeed in their efforts to take over Cato?

Jerry Taylor and Julian Sanchez don’t want to be under the thumb of the Koch Brothers at the Cato Institute. I sympathize. I don’t want to be under the thumb of the Koch Brothers either.