There are two ways to get enough;
one is to continue to accumulate more and more.
The other is to desire less.
G.K. Chesterton
Sobering Quote of the Day From Dean Kalahar
With a $14.587 trillion dollar national debt, the U. S. is on track for bankruptcy and catastrophic economic pain.The Social Security trust funds are not like a private investment fund or pension that an individual owns and where money is saved, invested, and grows for the rainy day of retirement. If Social Security revenues exceed expenditures, the surplus is credited to the trust funds in the form of U.S. government "special issue" non-marketable bonds. In order to repay those IOUs, the government will have to either: raise taxes, borrow the needed funds from private markets, reduce or cut other federal programs, reduce Social Security benefits by increasing the retirement age, link benefits increases to longevity, or lower automatic adjustments to benefits based on inflation.
In simple terms the FICA program is a pyramid or Ponzi scheme. In the fraud, people on the top of the pyramid collect as long as they can get others below them to pay in. Now as the baby boom retires, the takers outstrip the payers. And like all Ponzi schemes, this is when the system will collapse like a house of cards and take with it the American economy.
The day of reckoning is here. Not even the all powerful OZ can spend other people's money, write an IOU to himself, and then on some future day expect to use those IOUs to fund the Emerald City. It's time to pull back the curtains and admit "the emperor has no clothes."Carpe Diem Blog: Some Notes and Article Links
I periodically cite or quote Dr. Mark J. Perry's excellent blog on finance and economics. I encourage my regular users to access the blog and/or subscribe to a daily briefing of his posts roughly halfway down the right border of the blog.
In the process of writing the first point below, I discovered the search engine on the blog does not seem to pick up on a post I wrote a week ago last Wednesday on encouraging privatization of the USPS; among other things I wrote about 3 unsatisfactory customer service issues I've had with USPS. I did discover in the search I had written alternative, independent descriptions of the same incidents in a post a couple of years ago last month where Obama was arguing the benefits of public sector competition (for health care insurance) using the USPS competing against the private sector (UPS and Fed Express). I maintained both write-ups because there are additional facts of the incidents between versions, but I've posted a relevant update to the September 7 post. (As the reader may recall, the health care insurance public option was finally dropped, thank God, in the Senate around mid-December 2009.) I also criticized the politicization of the USPS management's ability to close money-losing post offices in an earlier post in January, not unlike the situation we saw of political wheeling and dealing to counteract the military's desire to close obsolete, redundant domestic military bases; eventually, there was a reform establishing an all-or-none vote in Congress.
The primary point of the commentaries was not my anecdotal experiences but Obama's laughable idea that the public sector does or can compete fairly with the private sector. Let us consider, for instance, the process of raising or cutting prices, laying off personnel (think of public sector employee collective bargaining agreements leaving managers unable to do layoffs, resort to part-time workers or subcontractors, etc.), etc., not to mention the fact that the federal government holds fiat currency printing presses and operates at deficits which would have led to scandal and/or bankruptcy proceedings in the private sector years ago. Competitive, fair business practices against UPS or Fed Express with glacial bureaucratic decisions, inflexible, unsustainable labor agreements, and a government-guaranteed monopoly on local delivery with the intrinsically lower marginal costs of package delivery (on top of regular mail delivery)?
- Ironic Ad. I use an external email service for most of my emails and will preview many of those messages online before downloading them to my PC. Some external email services are ad-supported. What I found rather amusing is when I previewed my daily summary of Dr. Perry's blog, I found the following ad. Both Dr. Perry and I are pro-market commentators, with a philosophy of privatizing nonessential government functionality. The USPS is in a dying business model with email and other services lowering the demand for snail mail services, where the cost of a stamp has been outstripping the cost of living, in large part due to a huge semi-skilled labor force (80% of USPS costs) averaging roughly $83,000 a head in compensation; there are payments due (at last mention) on huge retirement entitlement expenses. So consider the misleading pitch below; the question is not whether there are going to be layoffs but how many and how soon. The only lipstick on this pig is being applied by the mortician.
Now Hiring 2010 Postal Positions No Experience Necessary. Start Now!
[USPS Exam Training Commercial Website URL]
- A Follow-Up To Yesterday's Post on the TSA. Dr. Perry references a column on the Human Events website where the Congressman John Mica, the House "father of TSA" gives it a grade of D-, urges that screeners be privatized (at an estimated cost savings of 40%), that the agency be reduced to its original mandate (to focus on terrorist threats and intelligence gathering) and in size to 5000 (vs. over 60,000). He points out the TSA budget has more than quadrupled over the past decade, has yet to foil a single terrorist incident, and has responded almost entirely on a passive basis (in addition to the things I mentioned yesterday, I wasn't previously aware that the restrictions on liquids was based on a plot uncovered by the British).
- New Government Medical Billing System. And You Thought Taxes and Democratic "Reform" Laws Were Complicated... Coming To a Provider Near You Just Two Years From Now! The medical system uses today 18,000 codes, according to the Wall Street Journal's Anna Wilde Mathews; but when you think of how the federal government spent $797,400 on an outhouse for the National Park Service (I don't reckon most folks in the private sector spend that much on in-house plumbing...), $640 on a toilet seat or $436 on a hammer, just imagine how good a job government bureaucrats can tell the medical profession how to "improve" their coding system. Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it: 140,000! That's right--almost an eight-fold increase... This is, of course, for "accuracy of data and quality of care". (That's right--the real issue in quality health care is that hospital coding systems used in the private sector aren't sophisticated enough at 18,000.) If you read Ms. Mathews' column, you'll discover that there are codes for subjective assessments of a patient's personal hygiene (I haven't checked to see if there's one on whether you came to the hospital wearing clean underwear if you were injured in an accident...) Now if you slip and fall while shopping in the mall, you won't find a code for that, but luckily the doctor will find one if you burned yourself while water-skiing on burning skis, and if you get bitten by your pet turtle at home, you're covered!!! Artery sutures go from 1 to 195 codes, but the surgeon is lucky with that one; if he's got a fracture to treat, there are nearly 2600 options to choose from (pass the aspirin). Talk about pushing on a string... I'm big on usability--in this case fitting technology unobtrusively to the provider, augmenting his or her treatment of the patient, making it more effective and for a friendlier, more enjoyable treatment experience. This new system is what I've termed in my articles as Procrustean design in nature, built to conform to an arbitrary design for the convenience of the technologist. (I'm a big mythology buff--see my song choice below. Procrustes was a sadist in Greek mythology, offering hospitality to weary travelers but unsuspecting guests found that they were forced to conform to the bed he chose for them. If they were too short to fit the bed, they would be stretched; if they happened to be too tall, their limbs would be accordingly amputated to fit. Oh, and he chose the bed; he had different size beds, so even if you fit one of them...)
Fleetwood Mac, "Rhiannon". One of the best singles of the 1970's and the one that made me a fan of the group. Rhiannon is a figure in Welsh mythology; she, wearing fine clothes and riding a white horse, appears on a magical mound before the Demetian king Pwyll, instantly smitten. After 3 days of fruitlessly chasing her, he calls out her name; Rhiannon then approaches him. She prefers Pwyll to her fiancé. They eventually marry, but after bearing their son, a sleeping Rhiannon is framed by others for the abducted boy's "murder" and punished. The son is discovered and raised by others, but eventually reunites with his parents when his likeness to Pwyll is recognized; he is renamed Pryden and goes on to become a Welsh hero.
I prefer the Nicks' contributions to the group ("Gold Dust Woman", "Gypsy", "Landslide", "Sara", "Dreams", etc.) I also dug the lacy, frilly look.
