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By Tom Elia
July 27, 2001
The New Editor
I've got this new idea -- I’m just full of them, you know.
How about this for an IPO? What if there existed a private investment vehicle where people
would pay money into a "fund" that would immediately be "re-invested" by paying others
who got into the fund before them? The idea is so simple -- we could just bypass that pesky
investing "thing" -- there would be none of those cumbersome stocks or bonds for our
company -- just money in and then money out (we'd get our cut of the action, of course).
It is called SocialSecurity.com.
Once the thing got going, we could make it mandatory for everyone in the whole country
(and later, the whole wide world) to participate. The potential is enormous. We could start by
just charging rich people 2% of their earnings, building up to, say, 12.4% of the old
paycheck for everyone, rich or poor -- Woo-Hoo! Wouldn't the money start to roll in if that
happened!
We’ll make it easier on our clients by taking it out of their paychecks before they even see
their money -- because we at SocialSecurity.com care about our clients.
When any extra money comes in we could just spend it on other stuff and just issue "bonds"
back to the fund (we might even be able to not really pay any interest on those "bonds" --
maybe issue some IOU’s or something like that).
Heck, no one will probably even notice. It'll be a piece of cake.
There will undoubtedly be critics of our new company. Oh, they’ll say that
SocialSecurity.com is a sham or a ponzi scheme or something like that (those killjoys), but
that’s the beauty of the name of the company, who can argue with it? SocialSecurity.com is
a bullet-proof brand name.
When you've got a good brand name, who cares about the facts?
To further protect the company from any potential criticism and lend it an air of total honesty
and respectability, we could stack our board of directors with nationally known financial
luminaries like Al Gore (unless he's too busy inventing stuff) or maybe even Bill Clinton. AFL-
CIO boss John Sweeney would be a natural for our board of directors.
I’ll bet we could even get some other unions to back our project, they've got lots of dough --
maybe they'd like to get in on the ground floor and buy some stock.
Then they’ll get rich along with us.
Of course, our board of directors would have to be active advocates of SocialSecurity.com.
For example, if competitors try to muscle in on our business we could have Al Gore come
out and accuse them of having a "private, secret plan to privatize" our business model.
It would be a tough argument to counter.
It will also show that we are willing to fight for our customers -- and for the shareholders of
SocialSecurity.com. You see, SocialSecurity.com will care about our customers. Plus, we'll
make a ton of cash.
It’s a win-win metric.
SocialSecurity.com is a can't miss moneymaker. Don't miss our IPO -- wouldn't you like to
get in on the ground floor?
Tom Elia is a contributing editor for The New Editor.
Paul Geary
David Rogers