(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, file)

Ron Johnson’s campaign to tie Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Bernie Madoff together as fraudster financiers is more than decade old, and he’s not likely to give it up anytime soon.

On a Nov. 8 episode of The Mark Belling Show, Johnson and guest host Brian Schimming aired misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines, grievances about legislation and lobbed a bomb at Social Security.

“We can’t afford the entitlements [sic] programs we have today.” Johnson said at the timestamp 1:32:55 of the show. “The trust funds—which are a fiction, by the way—I mean, the money gets allocated to these trust funds, but it gets spent. In its place, Treasury bonds are floated. So, we’re still in debt for it … these things are Ponzi schemes, the money isn’t there. You invest it—whether it’s Social Security or whatever—and the federal government spends it, and they just put in place another government bond. There isn’t money, there aren’t assets backing up these trust funds.”

It’s hardly the first time Johnson has claimed Social Security is a scam.

In a TV ad during his first run for Senate, in 2010, Johnson predicts his opponent, Russ Feingold, will soon accuse of him of saying “Washington treats Social Security like a Ponzi scheme.”

Johnson says, well, “it’s true.”

Politicians of both parties “raided the Social Security trust fund of trillions and left seniors an IOU. They spent the money. It’s gone,” he said.

When the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram Editorial Board asked in 2011 how he would address Social Security’s long term solvency without upping the payroll tax, cutting benefits, or raising the retirement age, Johnson replied: “You can put all those things on the table. It’s actually actuarily pretty easy to do. … You can actually do these things by increasing the retirement age.”

In 2015, while reminiscing about former President George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize the program, Johnson said “[he] tried to do that and remember I said he got slaughtered politically. It went nowhere, which I thought was a shame.”

In 2016, during his re-election campaign, Johnson spoke to a local Wisconsin branch of Americans for Prosperity. He said he supported privatizing Social Security and reiterated his belief that it was a scam, Huffington Post reported.

“We’ve got to convince more of our fellow citizens that Social Security really is—and by the way, I was wrong when I said this in 2010, I said it’s a Ponzi scheme,” Johnson clarified. “Ponzi schemes are illegal. So, Social Security is, it’s a legal Ponzi scheme.”

Thankfully for retirees, Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. Social Security uses a portion of worker’s taxes to help fund their retirement. Surpluses are invested in U.S. Treasury bonds. At the end of 2020, those bonds were worth $2.9 trillion.

In other words, despite Johnson’s claim, the money workers pay into Social Security is very much there and not just “a bunch of paper.”

This story was edited for clarity and to add the episode of The Mark Belling Show.