For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and big words Bother me.
Winnie the Pooh
Tweet of the Day
Senate fails to override Obama's veto of Keystone Pipeline. Dems broke it; they own it. No more bitching over tanker or railroad spills.
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) March 4, 2015
Hillary Clinton used unauthorized email systems to conduct government business as Secretary of State. Was Sarah Palin her role model?
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) March 4, 2015
"I was near tears throughout [Bibi's] speech saddened by the insult to the intelligence of the United States."- Pelosi. Has she heard Obama?
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) March 4, 2015
"He [Bush] left us and we rejoiced; then an even more unbearable person [Obama] came." - Arabic proverb. http://t.co/AwDaFlYe9g
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) March 5, 2015
Netflix is having second thoughts about the FCC's Title II decision. Be really careful what you wish for: consider the election of Obama.
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) March 5, 2015
Image of the Day
Reason's Nanny of the Month
King v Burwell Heard Today: Will IRS' Arbitrary Ruling Expanding Subsidies to State Exchanges Run By the Feds Be Sustained or Will the Rule of Law Be Upheld?
Political Humor
Choose Life: Adoption and Twins
What Happens During a Depression When the Government Stays the Hell Out of It?
Facebook Corner
(Reason). Including the expected shortfall from unfunded liabilities like Social Security and Medicare brings our true debt to an unfathomable $90.6 trillion. Yet, neither Democrats nor Republicans seem willing to face up to this problem.
I'm getting a little tired of Reason and other ideological libertarians trying to equate the Republicans with the Democrats, who created these Ponzi scheme entitlements. It's like this piece's author has amnesia over Bush's crash-and-burn social security reform in 2005 and how Paul Ryan, who has suggested converting Medicare into a premium support system, was caricatured dumping Granny over the cliff. Democrats have been bashing the GOP for decades over threats to popular, unsustainable programs. What this author suggests, given a veto-bearing populist leftist President, amounts to political suicide. I'm hardly a GOP shill, but let's point out that given the limited hand the GOP has had since the 2006 elections, it has sharply slowed deficits as a percentage of GDP since 2010. But it would take something like the reverse of the 111th Congress--or a national budgetary crisis-- to overcoming Dems' stonewalling of long overdue fiscal reforms.
If the government would stop raiding money out of SS for other uses SS would not be in such bad shape.
This may be literally the stupidest OP comment I've ever seen on a Reason thread. The social security trust fund by law is required to be invested in US debt. Social security is a pay as you go system, meaning contributions are repackaged into distributions for current beneficiaries. Any surplus is used to purchase debt; any deficits in pay go are covered by interest income earned by the reserves or redeeming debt--which the government can fund out of operational surpluses (yeah, right) or selling publicly-held debt. Now of course, if contributions are in surplus, the government could issue intragovernment vs. publicly-held debt. But the last I heard (SSA trustees), the social security system has been in an operational deficit since 2010:
" Social Security’s total expenditures have exceeded non-interest income of its combined trust funds since 2010 and the Trustees estimate that Social Security cost will exceed non-interest income throughout the 75-year projection period. The Trustees project that this annual cash-flow deficit will average about $77 billion between 2014 and 2018 before rising steeply as income growth slows to its sustainable trend rate after the economic recovery is complete while the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers."
To translate for the mathematically challenged: the government cannot use the social security system to offset operational deficits when social security itself is running a deficit
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| Courtesy of Gary McCoy via Townhall |
Carly Simon, "That's the Way I Always Heard It Should Be". Although there are some trite themes I don't like in the lyrics (losing one's identity, blindly following tradition) and the reluctant agreement to marry (someone she doesn't seem madly in love with), the imagery is stark (her dad's cigarette glows in the dark), and the melancholic arrangement and hazy vocals make for a song unlike I had ever heard before or since.
