A trust is a non-living, legal  entity set up to control, manage and distribute wealth.   It's a tool commonly used by wealthy families to keep assets together, to manage those assets, to avoid taxes, and to pass assets along to the next generation.   Studying the lives of the heirs to very wealthy men of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century reveals two distinct patterns.   Where the original monies were divided among the children, the family fortunes commonly disappeared within about two generations.  Where the monies were held in trusts and made available to the family members as the trust's beneficiaries, the original fortunes are, in most cases, still there.   

Trusts, as financial control and asset protection tools, are readily available today.   In order to create a legal shell (the basic trust structure, itself), one has but to enlist a competent person or company to create it.²   Each trust can be custom-designed  for its own specific purpose.   A suggested structure is described as part of this project.

The next aspects to consider are where the trust assets are to come from  and how the money is to be used.  This brings the discussion to the original concept that was supposed to become a fully-funded and fully-functional United Sates government program called Social Security.   

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As a tool to see what can be done, an examination of what NOT to do can be a big eye opener.   To this end, an examination of  The United States Social Security system is in order.

The U.S. government's Social Security program is the classic example of what not to do.   The original, publicly stated intent was to collect money from the citizens and then to invest that money so that the investment would produce profits for the citizens .   Those who reached retirement age would receive their share of the profits in the form of monthly payments.   

The principal (the money paid in) was to be used 
    for investments only.   

That money was to remain in the Social Security investment portfolio and to continue earning profits even after the death of the individual who had put the money into the investment fund.   In this way the principal would constantly grow, as would the profits generated from the investments.   In a relatively short time the principal (the amount of invested money)  would be so large that the profits from the investments  shared by the retirees would be substantial.   The long-term, intended result was that everybody's retirement would be financially secure.

Millions of U.S. citizens entrusted the government with their retirement money.   And what did the government bureaucrats do with the money?   Did they invest it?   NO!   Did they keep it safe?   NO!   They spent it, and now that particular branch of the government is in debt to the tune of nearly forty trillion dollars ($40,000,000,000,000).

Was the Social Security system intentionally destroyed?   

When one asks this question,  two answers come back, the public answer and the real answer.    The public answer is " no,"  it was a question of need and mismanagement.   Politicians needed the money for this or that purpose , and besides,  they didn't steal the money, they just borrowed it.   

The real answer revolves around power and control.    Imagine for a moment what the size of that  investment portfolio would be today if all the money which had ever been paid into the U.S. Social Security System was still there and had been invested instead of having been "borrowed" (stolen)  and spent.   The profits today would be enormous.   Its economic power would dwarf its closest rivals, and it would dominate and  control financial investments worldwide.   

What Could It Have Done?   

That investment portfolio would eventually have owned just about everything, including controlling the major corporations that are presently raping the Earth for a few dollars more.   The profits that now go to the super-wealthy, would, instead, have belonged collectively, to all the people in the country.   Private ownership of the natural resources which are now controlled and raped by special interests would have been purchased and returned to their rightful owners --  all the people.   The retirement age could have been steadily lowered, instead of raised.     In time, it could have completely transformed the monetary system.   It could have significantly reduced and then eliminated the need for taxes.   Wealth would be distributed much more fairly and equally.   There would no longer be a need to steal to survive.    Crime would have been significantly lowered.   The con artists and manipulators such as those who presently own all the structures that control the government would be out of business.    The super wealthy saw the future potential of Social Security.   They falsely considered it a threat to their power and control,  and so they intentionally destroyed it.

Imagine for a moment that that investment fund 
    actually existed today.   

Imagine that Social Security had a forty-trillion-dollar investment portfolio instead of a forty-trillion-dollar debt.   Imagine that  investment making only a meager two and one-half percent annual interest.  Even at that ridiculously low rate of return, the return on investment would be a trillion dollars a year in free and clear money that would be available for retired Americans.   That's about double what is currently (2005)  being paid to Social Security recipients.   There are about 48 million benefit recipients.   Even at that extremely low, two-and-one-half percent rate of return, payments from profits would average over $20,000 per year per person.   And, unlike today, not one nickel of that money would be coming from taxes.    

Another Comparison  

As another comparison, note that as of March 2005, according to Investment Company Institute, there was a total of about eight trillion dollars invested in mutual funds.  That total  (those investment dollars as much as they are)  is only twenty percent as big as Social Security would have been if the money had not been stolen and spent.   

In  addition, imagine that the five-hundred million dollars ($500,000,000) in Social Security taxes which are now being put into the system each year were  being used to increase the size of the investment portfolio and not ( as is presently being done) spend/used to pay retirees.    

If you had five-hundred million dollars each and every year to buy companies and tangible assets, how long would it take before you owned just about everything?   As you can see, the potential of collective investments  is awesome.   

Building a Replacement -- One Step at a Time

This concept, on a smaller scale, can be re-instituted by anyone and used for any purpose that requires funding.   Anyone who wants to can create his (her) own trust and determine who the beneficiaries shall be and when and how the benefits shall be distributed.   The TLC-Life-Center Team is spearheading a movement in which individuals, families,  groups, clubs, churches, labor unions, social service organizations, and other similar groups create Tangible-asset, Retirement-funding Trusts for members of their particular  group who are interested in participating.    The goal is to have the beneficiaries in control of their own retirement monies and to base the investments on tangible assets such as real estate ^**msc1  and not value-losing dollars or on promises to pay such as stocks and bonds.   

The retirement trusts can be a privately controlled, mini-version of what the Social Security investment program was supposed to be.   When several of those privately controlled trusts direct their assets toward a common goal, their collective financial clout will grow and become a power to be reckoned with.   And because the trusts assets are never spent or otherwise disposed of, the trust and its financial power will steadily grow.

Now that you have a grasp of the potential, the next step is to modify the concept and apply it to you and to me and to all the participants in The Reasonables' New-Vision Project.  

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The Cooperation Structure   

In order for this project to work, it's critically important that all participants play using the cooperation structure.    Please review the section titled:    Cooperation Versus Competition.   The "us against them" mode of functioning has to be given a one-way ticket to the trash bin.   

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Continued  on --  Page 4 

Some Basic Economics

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