Kindred Spirits
Charles Ponzi (1882 - 1949)
Occupation: Businessman
Bernard L. Madoff (1938 - present)
Occupation: Businessman 
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945)
President, Created Social Security
CARPE DIEM
Professor Mark J. Perry's Blog for Economics and Finance
Monday, December 15, 2008
Occupation: Businessman
About Me
- Name: Mark J. Perry
- Location: Washington, D.C., United States
Dr. Mark J. Perry is a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan. Perry holds two graduate degrees in economics (M.A. and Ph.D.) from George Mason University near Washington, D.C. In addition, he holds an MBA degree in finance from the Curtis L. Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. In addition to a faculty appointment at the University of Michigan-Flint, Perry is also a visiting scholar at The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
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14 Comments:
Going forward, what used to be called a Ponzi Scheme should now be called a Madoff Scheme. Would that ever sting.
http://rightsideproject.blogspot.com
I'd add FDR...
Exactly Jeff Lehner, how come FDR's picture isn't here?
After all when you compare Ponzi and Madoff to Social Security, those two guys are just amateur pikers...
OK, FDR has been added.
I think you forgot to add Dubya to the roll of ponzi schemers: Medicare Part D is a $17.2 trillion made-off ponzi scheme.
As Dallas Fed President Fisher says:
Please sit tight while I walk you through the math of Medicare. As you may know, the program comes in three parts: Medicare Part A, which covers hospital stays; Medicare B, which covers doctor visits; and Medicare D, the drug benefit that went into effect just 29 months ago. The infinite-horizon present discounted value of the unfunded liability for Medicare A is $34.4 trillion. The unfunded liability of Medicare B is an additional $34 trillion. The shortfall for Medicare D adds another $17.2 trillion. The total? If you wanted to cover the unfunded liability of all three programs today, you would be stuck with an $85.6 trillion bill. That is more than six times as large as the bill for Social Security.It is more than six times the annual output of the entire U.S. economy
anonymous 11:15,
$85.6 trillion? I think they have a failed business plan.
both are ponzi schemes... they only work when the infolw of new workers is gretaer then the older retiring generation. The fact that people dont wake up to this and defende the notion that they have some birth right to social security checks is a only making the day or reckening that much worse. But don;t worry, the current politicians will all be dead and it will be gen X and Y left to pay for all of it.
EJ,
I think you're taking the wrong stance on that issue. I think it's time for my generation to be realistic and realize that we're simply paying into a system that we won't get anything out of and stop the cycle of government reliance.
Well, it would have been FDR's name or someone else's.
Either he responded by someone who would do it or someone would replace him that would do it.
Outstanding Professor Mark...
anon @ 11:15 AM says: "I think you forgot to add Dubya to the roll of ponzi schemers: Medicare Part D is a $17.2 trillion made-off ponzi scheme"...
Excellent point sir!
Jed Babbin over at Human Events writes: Bush as Bankrupt as GM
"Well, it would have been FDR's name or someone else's'...
How do you know?
There was plenty of opposition to FDR's socialist nonsense but Democrats pandering to unions got some of it through...
Thank you Fitz Brundage...
> I think you forgot to add Dubya to the roll of ponzi schemers: Medicare Part D is a $17.2 trillion made-off ponzi scheme.
How is this Bush's? Unlike F.D.R., most of whose cabinet was behind proposals like SSec, current things like Medicare are much more a creation of Congress than the PotUS.
If that's wrong, feel free to correct me, I haven't looked into the history of that part of Medicare.
> Either he responded by someone who would do it or someone would replace him that would do it.
That is such BULLshit.
1) It was devised, pushed for, and implemented entirely by FDR and his advisors.
2) One might readily have devised a scheme which wasn't an inherent Ponzi scheme. The flaws in any Ponzi scheme are obvious and were well-known even in FDR's time.
3) Over a period of decades, business consistently improves in valuation. This was demonstrable even in FDR's time. By tying income to business, and spreading it around to minimize absolute risk, there is no rational argument against tying such investment income to markets, which does and would pay several times what the social security Ponzi scheme pays out. Even with the current downturn, bad as it is, the market is still better than it was 15 years ago, and, over the next 20, will recover all that and a lot more, assuming Obama doesn't f* it up one heck of a lot more.
At times I suspect Rush Limbaugh is reading this blog. Not that he needs it, since he is so brilliant.
Anyhow, he made that point also - that the GREATEST Ponzi Scheme is the so-called Social Security, which is neither social nor secure. LOL
Oh~~ B. Milhouse Obama, the socialist-secular messiah... Come, please come down from the clouds and save our constitutional Republic (of LIMITED government powers).
D
So was it Ponzi who was the father of bogus pyramidal business schemes. Huh, I always thought it was DeVos who founded Amway.
Why can't we admit that there were some components of the New Deal that were helpful (e.g. some employment that reduced starvation.) Others were not, like the tightening of credit. But it was that huge government spending program (World War II)that ultimately bailed us out of the depression. Instead of paying some guys to plant trees we paid larger numbers of them to build tanks and planes.
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