A "PONZI" is a "PONZI" by any other name

As I listened to everybody but the Pope bad mouth Bernard Madoff for stealing money through a “PONZI” scheme I began to wonder exactly what a “PONZI” scheme is. I checked with WIKIPEDIA and found the following definition:
A Ponzi scheme is an investment operation that pays returns to investors out of the money paid by subsequent investors rather than from profit. AKA Pyramid scheme/ AKA Matrix scheme.
This guy stole from the poor and rich alike. No one can accuse him of discrimination based on financial status. I have no doubt Madoff is a thief and should be punished accordingly. We all know his attorney’s will tie this thing up with investigations, technicalities, and appeals until Madoff is either to old to care or dead. That, in and of itself, is sad enough but not what really makes me mad. The thing about all this that gets my boxers in a bunch is the definition itself. Any reasonable person understands this scheme will run dry sooner or later depending on how much money is siphoned out while paying the initial investors. It sounds like Madoff was running the largest “PONZI” scheme in history but the more I thought about it the more I realized he’s just a small fish in the pond. We have a scheme several times larger than his. It’s disguised as a government program we call “Social Security“!!!