Nuzzleglance Pocketorbs, son of Alley Oop, doesn’t much care for government programs whereby you pay for retirement, then you get old and get your money back.

Our Enemy, the Payroll Tax
By ROSS DOUTHAT | New York Times

. . Payroll taxes are a relic of New Deal Machiavellianism: by taking a bite of every worker’s paycheck and promising postretirement returns, Franklin Roosevelt effectively disguised Social Security as a pay-as-you-go system, even though the program actually redistributes from rich to poor and young to old. That disguise has helped keep Social Security sacrosanct — hailed by Democrats because it protects the poor and backed by Republicans as a reward for steady work.

By “taking a bite of every worker’s paycheck and promising postretirement returns,” everyone is assured a minimal income in old age. Don’t know how this confuses.

For the Douthats, the human bulldozers mechanized under the philosophical tents of conservatism, they find it annoyingly hard to push the poor back into the Victorian dregs as long as the feds have provided a retirement program, and financed it with the poors’ own money. So this post provides no wonder.

Ross would love to see direct-pay Social Security savaged because its finances would get bounced into the nebulous world of appropriation foofery and budgets renoberation. After that, t’would be game on.