Democrats are happy to blame Republicans for Social Security failing, despite; when SS itself, its framework, and how it functioned, was created “by” Democrats in Congress under the Democrat president FDR.
So as much as Democrats complain about the system failing, THEY, ultimately, are the ones responsible for it failing as it is they who built it off the foundation of a Ponzi scheme to begin with.
They just hoped not to be the ones holding it when it blew up.
And while Democrats claim ‘republicans did nothing’, Gorge W Bush tried to change how SS was structured.
He wanted to allow younger workers (under age 55) the option to divert a portion of their payroll taxes (around 2–4 percentage points) into voluntary personal retirement accounts invested in stocks and bonds.
Guess who opposed that?
The, self-centered, self-serving, narcissistic, hypocrites, in the Democrat party.
The way SS operates, and has operated since its inception in 1935, is a 1:1 copy of how Ponzi Schemes operate.
In a Ponzi Scheme, you talk group A into ‘investing’ in your plan. Then, the following month, you talk group B, which has 6 more people in it, into also investing into your plan, while taking the money they give you to pay those who have invested from Group A as their ‘earnings’ from their investment. You then, the following month, talk group C into Investing, which has 40 more people than group A and B on it, into your plan, then use that money to pay both Group A and B their ‘return on investment’.
That is literally how a Ponzi Scheme works.
SS 100% depends on the ‘next group’ of workers outnumbering the ‘previous groups’ who are now drawing SS, so that those previous groups always get a ‘return’ on their “investment”, which is really just the money taken from the newest group, distributed to all the previous groups.
SS is quite literally modeled 1:1 on that same exact model.
The money taken by force from your pay today, is immediately used to fill the ‘return on investment’ of those currently drawing SS the following month
Calling it a Ponzi-scheme is not a mistake, or inaccurate, because it is one.
The only difference, is that instead of it being ran by a ‘single’ individual, of small group of individuals, it is ran by the US Government.
The entire “Make the rich pay more!!!!” Is just another ‘bandaid’ on the broken system. They want to literally make others ‘subsidize’ the broken system, while getting nothing else extra in return, and pretend that doing so will somehow ‘make it work’.
Combine the fact people live longer these days, with low birth-rates, and SS fails due to the inherent faulty design it is built on.
SS was created in 1935.
The average lifespan of someone in 1930 was 60
The average lifespan of someone in 1940 was 63
The average lifespan of someone in 1950 was 68.
The average lifespan of someone today is 80
People are living longer, meaning more and more is being drawn ‘from’ the Ponzi-scheme while less and less is going in due to falling population and less kids becoming workers to pay into it.
It’s also why the government, BOTH Democrat AND Republicans, keep raising and raising the age to retire. They are desperately trying to prevent it from failing, as the longer someone is pulling money from it, they are creating a bigger strain on the system.
But then, that is ‘also’ one of the many reasons why Democrats so desperately want to protect the mass migration of people they allowed into the country illegally, and are desperately trying to legalize.
They want the influx of ‘paying in’ individuals to shore up the system.
Gwydion_Wolf 🇺🇸✓
TX Clinics & Physician Practices
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JUST WHO IS SCOTT BESSENT, REALLY?
Scott Bessent is the most consequential figure in the current administration. He is also the least examined. The two facts are not unrelated.
By Robin Reynolds - Author and Investigative Journalist
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THE MAN NOBODY LOOKED AT
Scott Bessent has never been a "front man". In forty years of moving through the largest pools of institutional money on earth -- Saudi family offices, George Soros, his own hedge fund, and now the United States Treasury -- Bessent has operated as the second-most-visible person in every room while controlling more of its outcomes than anyone present. This is not coincidence. It is method. It is, in fact, the only consistent principle his career reveals.
He is the 79th Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. He controls US fiscal policy: taxation, the federal budget, the government equity portfolio, and the Exchange Stabilization Fund -- a $218 billion instrument that requires only his signature to deploy.
Through the replacement process he personally ran, he also effectively controls monetary policy: he selected the man who now chairs the Federal Reserve and sets American interest rates. He holds undivested farmland whose income depends on Chinese soybean imports while personally negotiating tariff policy with China. He deployed $20 billion in taxpayer money to rescue his personal friend's collapsing hedge fund. He cleared the regulatory runway for Elon Musk's payment platform within hours of being handed temporary authority over the agency that would have supervised it.
Every one of those statements is documented. None of them has appeared together in a single published piece. This is that piece.
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THE RESUME AS PREVIEW
Scott Kenneth Homer Bessent was born in Conway, South Carolina in 1962. He attended Yale, graduated in 1984 with a degree in political science, and considered journalism before settling on finance. His first job after Yale was at the Olayan Group -- a Riyadh-based Saudi family investment conglomerate. This detail appears in every biography and is examined in none of them. Before Soros, before Key Square, before Treasury, Bessent's first professional exposure was to Saudi institutional money. The through-line of his career begins there: find the largest available pool of capital, make yourself useful, never be the most visible person involved.
In 1991, George Soros hired him. Bessent ran Soros Fund Management's London office for most of the 1990s. In September 1992, he was a leading member of the team that shorted the British pound on Black Wednesday, netting Soros more than $1 billion in a single day and bringing the Bank of England to its knees. In 2013, back at Soros after a failed solo venture, he shorted the Japanese yen during the Abenomics period and generated another $1.2 billion in profit in three months. The Wall Street Journal called him the Man Who Broke the Bank of Japan.
In 2015 he left Soros to launch Key Square Capital Management. The launch was seeded with a $2 billion anchor investment from Soros himself -- at the time one of the largest hedge fund launches in history, raising $4.5 billion total. Australia's sovereign wealth fund came in. One hundred and eighty institutional investors committed.
Then the fund fell apart. Key Square lost money in 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2021. Assets collapsed from $5.1 billion at peak to $577 million by 2023. Institutional investors fell from 180 to 20. The man who broke two national banking systems could not sustain a hedge fund through a decade of ordinary market conditions.
By the time Trump nominated him for Treasury, Bessent's reputation needed rehabilitation. He had a network, a pedigree, and a track record of catastrophic underperformance. The Treasury Department was the largest vehicle he had ever been handed. He was not going to waste it.
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THE SOROS PROBLEM
The most important unresolved contradiction in Bessent's public life is the one the MAGA movement would find most explosive if anyone bothered to assemble it fully.
For the better part of two decades, Bessent managed money for George Soros -- the man the American right has elevated into its central villain, its all-purpose explanation for global progressive conspiracy, its Emmanuel Goldstein. The administration Bessent now serves has made Soros into a rhetorical weapon used against every political opponent. Elon Musk called Bessent a Soros agent on X during the transition. He was not wrong about the biography.
But it goes further than employment. Bessent was listed through 2020 in International Crisis Group publications alongside Alex Soros, George's son, as a member of the organization's President's Council -- a donor body the Soros family has funded to the tune of $75 million. He donated to Al Gore. He donated to John Kerry. He donated to Barack Obama. He wrote a $25,000 check to the Ready for Hillary super PAC the month it launched in 2013. He was named to Out magazine's Out 100 list of prominent American gays and lesbians in 2001 after hosting an Al Gore fundraiser at his home.
Then in 2016 Trump won, and Bessent pivoted. He began donating to the RNC, the NRCC, and the NRSC -- eventually more than $1.5 million. Some of those early Republican National Committee filings list his employer as Soros Fund Management. The FEC document exists. It has never been highlighted in a published piece. The man writing checks to Trump's party apparatus was doing so with Soros's name on his business card.
And then there is All Seasons Press. Bessent secretly founded a right-wing publishing house. All Seasons Press published books by Mark Meadows, Peter Navarro, and Tucker Carlson. It was started, in the company's own words, to publish the best writers, politicians, and pundits in the conservative movement -- specifically those being attacked, bullied, and banned, a founding rationale explicitly tied to the aftermath of January 6th. Bessent's name appeared nowhere in the company's media coverage, on its website, or in its masthead. His involvement was deliberately concealed from the start.
Author Lee Smith discovered the concealment when he tried to sue. Smith had sold All Seasons a book critical of Soros, globalists, and American high finance -- and learned after the fact that the publisher to which he had sold that manuscript was secretly owned by a Soros protege with active investments in China. Smith alleged fraud. The case settled. Bessent was never deposed. He has never been publicly required to explain why the man who managed Soros money for two decades secretly built a MAGA publishing empire behind a corporate veil.
The only coherent explanation is that Bessent does not have ideological commitments. He has positional commitments. When Soros was the largest pool of money he could access, Bessent was a progressive donor who played tennis with Soros in London while paparazzi waited outside. When Trump became the largest pool of power he could access, Bessent became a MAGA publisher and a nine-figure Republican donor. The ideology is a costume. The method is the man.
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THE ETHICS AGREEMENT HE DIDN'T HONOR
Before his confirmation, Bessent signed a legally binding agreement with the Office of Government Ethics. He would divest at least two dozen financial assets within 90 days of taking office. The list included private equity funds, stakes in private companies, farmland, and cryptocurrency-related products. The pledge was submitted to the Senate as part of his confirmation record. The 90-day deadline passed on April 28, 2025. He had not documented selling a single required asset.
In August 2025, OGE Deputy Compliance Director Dale Christopher sent a formal letter to Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo confirming that Bessent had failed to timely comply with the terms of the ethics agreement he signed. The letter noted that OGE had instructed Treasury ethics officials to remind Bessent that it is his personal responsibility to avoid any action that could create a real or apparent conflict of interest with regard to his holdings.
The Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Defenders Fund filed formal complaints with OGE and the Treasury Inspector General requesting investigation into potential violations of criminal conflict-of-interest law. Their complaint noted that Bessent had failed to report selling even one asset, and that after the deadline passed he had requested an amendment to his agreement -- without the prior OGE approval required by that same agreement -- to continue holding three investments he was already obligated to have sold.
Bessent responded publicly that he had divested 96 percent of his required assets. He did not explain why the 4 percent remaining included some of the most structurally conflicted positions in his portfolio.
The farmland is the clearest case. Bessent holds as much as $25 million worth of soybean and corn farmland in North Dakota, generating up to $1 million annually in rental income. Roughly 70 percent of North Dakota soybeans are exported to China. Scott Bessent is the principal US trade negotiator with China. He has been designing, announcing, and adjusting the tariff regime that governs Chinese soybean imports while holding farmland whose cash flow depends directly on those same trade flows.
Treasury ethics officials told OGE the farmland was illiquid and not readily marketable, which is why it remained undivested. No one has publicly noted that the illiquidity defense does not address the conflict -- it simply explains why the conflict continues.
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THE CFPB MOVE
February 3, 2025. Bessent is named acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Within one hour of the appointment, an all-hands email goes out to CFPB staff from Bessent's office: no proposed or final rules, no enforcement actions, no settlements, no public communications, no litigation filings. Everything frozen. Indefinitely. Pending review.
The next day, a second memo goes out with one addition that did not appear in the original. The CFPB is directed not to initiate supervisory designation proceedings or designate any nondepository institution for supervision.
The legal machinery of that one sentence is specific. The CFPB has authority to designate large nonbank financial companies for enhanced supervision -- subjecting them to the same oversight regime as major banks -- when they pose risks to consumers. The designation process for digital payment platforms was already underway for companies including Google Pay and CashApp. The next company approaching the threshold for designation was X.
X had just announced a partnership with Visa to launch X Money, a peer-to-peer payment wallet that would connect to a debit card and allow users to hold balances. The product was moving toward larger-participant status in the payment app market -- precisely the classification that would trigger CFPB supervisory designation.
Bessent's day-two memo ensured that would not happen. By barring designation proceedings against any nondepository institution, he cleared the regulatory runway for Musk's payment product before the agency he was temporarily running had a chance to examine it. Musk tweeted CFPB RIP the following day.
Bessent never acknowledged the connection. No journalist pursued it as the targeted regulatory gift it was. The CFPB had returned more than $21 billion to defrauded consumers since its founding. Its supervision of payment platforms was one of its most consequential and active areas of work. What Bessent did in his first 48 hours as acting director was not a general freeze. It was a precision instrument aimed at one company's specific regulatory exposure -- on behalf of a man who was simultaneously dismantling the agency with DOGE from the inside.
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THE ARGENTINA OPERATION
This is the most fully documented instance of Bessent deploying public money to rescue his personal network. The sequence is the story.
Robert Citrone founded Discovery Capital Management, a hedge fund with approximately $2.5 billion under management. Citrone and Bessent worked together at Soros Fund Management. Citrone has publicly stated that he was responsible for 75 percent of Bessent's bonus in 2013 by providing Bessent with profitable investment advice. Latin American financial press has described their relationship as both personal and professional across decades.
In 2024, Citrone made large bets on Argentina. He purchased Argentine government debt and equity across the economy, betting that Javier Milei's libertarian program would revitalize Argentine markets. By early September 2025, the bet was failing badly. Milei's party suffered a significant defeat in the Buenos Aires provincial elections. Investors began dumping the peso. Citrone's fund was on the brink of severe losses.
Argentine media outlets -- Perfil, CE Noticias Financieras -- reported that Citrone personally contacted Bessent and asked him to intervene. Two weeks before Bessent's announcement, Citrone purchased additional Argentine bonds at distressed prices. Argentine journalists publicly flagged the timing as suspicious, raising questions about whether Citrone had advance knowledge of the government's plans.
On September 24, 2025, Bessent announced a $20 billion financial package for Argentina, financed through the Exchange Stabilization Fund. He then organized a parallel $20 billion facility from private banks -- JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs. Those banks demanded government backstops before they would participate: they wanted the upside if Argentina recovered, and the losses covered by American taxpayers if it did not. Treasury did not dispute that characterization.
Total exposure: $40 billion. Half from American taxpayers. Deployed without a congressional vote. Congress and the American public learned about the intervention when Bessent posted about it on X.
This happened while the administration was simultaneously refusing to release $8 billion to cover a funding shortfall for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Forty million Americans were facing food assistance cuts while the Treasury Secretary was organizing a $40 billion rescue for a South American government whose collapse threatened the investments of his personal friend.
House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin sent a letter to Citrone demanding all communications among Citrone, Bessent, Trump, and Milei related to the bailout, along with documentation of Discovery Capital's Argentine holdings and projected financial gains from the intervention. No documents were produced in response.
Bessent told CNBC that the characterization of the bailout as a rescue for wealthy Americans with Argentine interests could not be more false. The documented record is unambiguous.
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THE WEAPON
Almost no one outside government finance has heard of the Exchange Stabilization Fund. This is by design. It was established by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, created as a reserve to stabilize the US dollar during currency market disruptions. It holds $218 billion in total assets -- $43.6 billion net, with the remainder in Special Drawing Rights from the IMF and foreign currency positions. Its deployment requires only the explicit authorization of the Treasury Secretary and the approval of the President.
No congressional vote. No prior notification requirement. No independent manager. No meaningful public oversight mechanism before the money moves. Congress exercises oversight only through after-the-fact reporting: monthly reports that are unaudited, and an annual report that is legally required to be audited. The FY2025 audited annual report has not been produced.
In May 2026, Senators Shaheen and Grassley -- a bipartisan pair -- introduced the Exchange Stabilization Fund Transparency Act because the Treasury Secretary is currently not required to justify use of the fund to Congress at all, even when deploying tens of billions of dollars to benefit foreign governments and the private investors who hold their debt. The bill has not passed. It is not law. Bessent still holds the keys.
The Argentina operation demonstrated what this weapon looks like in practice. A personal friend's investments were failing. A phone call was made. Twenty billion dollars in taxpayer money moved without a vote. Private banks were organized to contribute another twenty billion on the condition that their losses would be guaranteed by the government. The total commitment was equal to five years of SNAP funding for every food-insecure American.
The government equity portfolio presents the same unresolved question on a larger scale. More than $20 billion has been extracted from private companies -- Intel, MP Materials, Westinghouse, Lithium Americas, Trilogy Metals, Vulcan Elements, xLight, and others -- in exchange for regulatory approvals, government contracts, and diplomatic muscle.
That portfolio is appreciating. The Intel stake alone, acquired at $20.47 per share, has generated tens of billions in unrealized gains. When it is eventually liquidated, the proceeds will flow somewhere. There is no statute governing where. There is no independent manager determining how. There is no audit requirement covering what happens to the cash. There is only one signature required. It is his.
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THE FEDERAL RESERVE CAPTURE
The capture of the Federal Reserve did not require a firing. It required a process. In 2024, before Bessent was even confirmed as Treasury Secretary, he proposed that Trump designate a replacement for Jerome Powell far in advance of the chairmanship's natural expiration. The explicit rationale was to neutralize Powell through what Bessent called forward guidance. Based on the concept of forward guidance, Bessent said publicly, no one is really going to care what Jerome Powell has to say anymore. The sitting chair of the Federal Reserve would be made irrelevant by the announcement of his successor.
Once confirmed, Bessent ran the formal vetting process for that successor. He screened candidates. He advised Trump on the short list. He publicly acknowledged being part of the decision-making process. Kevin Warsh -- a former Fed governor, Wall Street veteran, and figure with close ties to the Trump administration -- emerged from that process as the nominee. Warsh was confirmed by the Senate. He now chairs the Federal Reserve and sets US interest rates.
The structural consequence of this sequence has not been described plainly in any major publication. The Treasury Secretary controls fiscal policy: government spending, taxation, the equity portfolio, and the Exchange Stabilization Fund. The Federal Reserve chair controls monetary policy: interest rates, money supply, and the credit architecture of the US economy. These two functions are kept constitutionally and institutionally separate precisely to prevent any single actor or network from controlling both simultaneously.
Bessent did not seize control of the Fed directly. He did something more durable: he selected the man who runs it. The person who now sets interest rates for the United States economy was chosen through a process that Bessent designed, managed, and participated in as the central evaluator. When monetary policy needs to move in a direction that benefits the equity portfolio Bessent oversees, or the sovereign wealth fund he is assembling, or the foreign currency positions he manages through the ESF, he has a relationship with the man making that decision that no prior Treasury Secretary has had.
This is the completion of the circuit. Fiscal policy, monetary policy, the equity portfolio, the slush fund, and the regulatory architecture of American finance -- all flowing through a single network, anchored by a single figure, accountable to no single independent institution with the power to stop him.
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THE FULL CIRCUIT
Pull back far enough and the career resolves into a single coherent principle. Scott Bessent has spent forty years locating the largest available pool of institutional money or political power, attaching himself to it at a level just below maximum visibility, making himself indispensable, and then moving to the next and larger pool when the moment arrived.
Saudi family office. Then Soros. Then his own fund seeded with Soros money. Then the US Treasury, with access to more capital and regulatory power than any private institution in the world.
At each transition he maintained relationships on every side of every divide. He donated to Gore and to McCain in the same period. He managed progressive institutional capital while secretly building a MAGA publishing house. He is the first openly gay cabinet member confirmed by a Republican Senate -- a living embodiment of coalition maintenance in an administration that has been openly hostile to LGBTQ rights across every other policy front. He is useful to everyone because he has made himself necessary to everyone. This is not hypocrisy. It is engineering.
And the engineering is nearly complete. He controls the fiscal apparatus. He controls the ESF. He selected the Fed chair. He maintains undivested financial positions whose value depends on his own policy decisions. He has demonstrated, in the Argentina case, a willingness to deploy public money to rescue private investments belonging to members of his personal network. He has demonstrated, in the CFPB case, a willingness to use temporary regulatory authority to shield a politically connected private company from oversight. He has assembled a government equity portfolio with no statute governing liquidation and no independent manager overseeing deployment.
What is missing is a prosecutor. There is no independent counsel. There is no Special Inspector General for Treasury operations equivalent to SIGTARP, the watchdog created after the 2008 financial crisis to monitor executive branch financial self-dealing. The ethics office can write letters. Senators can introduce transparency bills. House committees can demand documents that are never delivered.
Bessent keeps working. Quietly. Effectively. Exactly as he always has.
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SOURCES
Office of Government Ethics -- Bessent ethics agreement and noncompliance letters, January-August 2025. Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Defenders Fund -- formal complaint and supplemental complaint, August 2025. Senate Finance Committee -- Crapo correspondence. Revolving Door Project -- Bessent financial interests and CFPB analysis. Popular Information -- Argentina bailout and Citrone connection reporting, September-October 2025. House Judiciary Committee -- Raskin letter to Citrone, October 31, 2025. Paul Krugman Substack -- Argentina bailout analysis. American Banker -- CFPB nondepository supervision order analysis. The American Prospect -- CFPB stop-work order reporting. Senators Schiff and Warren -- CFPB conflict-of-interest correspondence. Congress. gov -- Exchange Stabilization Fund analysis and legislative history. Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- Shaheen-Grassley ESF Transparency Act. Brookings Institution -- ESF and Argentina analysis. House Financial Services Committee Democrats -- ESF oversight letter, October 2025. Tablet Magazine -- All Seasons Press investigation. Project 2025 Admin -- Bessent background documentation. CNBC -- government equity portfolio reporting. Fortune -- Bessent net worth, divestiture, career profile. NOTUS -- Trump personal stock portfolio investigation. CSIS -- federal equity investments analysis. Institutional Investor -- Key Square performance history. CNN -- Bessent career profile and Federal Reserve reporting. Wikipedia -- Bessent biography. FEC filings -- donor history. CNBC
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.......... Copyright © 2026 by Robin Riley Reynolds / All Rights Reserved ....
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Robin Reynolds✓
TX Clinics & Physician Practices
