Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship.
Others have their family;
but to a solitary and an exile,
his friends are everything.
Willa Cather
Having to Fight the Health Bureaucracy Every Step of the Way
Imagine having a beautiful dying 10-year-old girl whose best chance at survival is getting on an adult lung waiting list, but because of an arbitrary age qualification it amounted to a death sentence imposed by rule-makers, so you have to go to court to force a change. Sarah Murnaghan won a court decision and policy change, but is this a harbinger of things to come under the centralized madness of ObamaCare?
Yet Another Reason I Refuse to Move to the Left Coast
Idiotic Exploitative Public Pensions
From the Detroit News:
Matt Schenk, 41, [Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano]'s former chief of staff, left the county last year to become chief operating officer of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, a job that pays $194,000 per year. For months, he’s said he would defer applying for a controversial early retirement plan that waived age requirements for a handful of Ficano’s top aides. Schenk switched course in recent weeks and began filing paperwork to get the pension that pays $96,000 per year.
Schenk was among Ficano appointees promised early retirement deals in 2011 that allowed them to buy up to four years of service and waived the retirement age. The deals are a source of consternation among retirement board members, who say they are draining a struggling system that is funded at about 50 percent. The average county retiree makes about $23,000.Getting almost twice the average household income for life at 41? Retiring at 37 with well above the maximum social security payments for life? I'm older with no pension plan, but this isn't about jealousy: as a matter of ethics I could not take advantage of long-suffering taxpayers and/or at the expense of more modestly paid pensioners whom start drawing at older ages, especially given an underfunded plan as it is. As far as I'm concerned, they should prosecute the legal plunderers whom designed and implemented this anti-taxpayer sweetheart deal. One thing is for sure: we will not allow a federal bailout of Michigan state or local pension programs.
The deals and others have allowed a former human resources executive and Ficano appointee, Nancy Olind, to retire at 37 with a $42,500 pension and former appointee Sue Hamilton Smith to get a $70,000 pension after seven years with the county.
IOUSA Revisited
Back in 2008, the year I started this blog, an unlikely, widely acclaimed documentary (see dated summary below) on the US debt crisis was released. Financial newsletter publisher and movie co-writer Addison Wiggin has written a short 5-year retrospective he calls, with just cause, an American leadership deficit. Some sobering excerpts:
[Ed Note. Update on Unfunded Liabilities: Since the release of I.O.U.S.A. back in 2008, that $53 trillion figure has ballooned to roughly $87 trillion... although even that may be a conservative estimate. Laurence Kotlikoff, a well-respected professor of economics at Boston University, looked at the fiscal gap versus the official debt and came up with a slightly different number: $222 trillion. And he’s not alone. Niall Ferguson calculates U.S. unfunded liabilities are even larger, at roughly $238 trillion. Bottom line is it’s a massive amount. And unfortunately, “nada” is still the amount of it we actually have.]
As far as taxes go, the United States would have to raise income tax rates across the board by about 2.5 times today’s levels to close the financing gap — and some politicians complain when there is any talk of tax increases. Americans are facing a 150% increase in federal taxes if they continue down this road. By the year 2048, the United States’ debt-to-GDP ratio will be over 400%, more than two times the debt levels we hit at the height of World War II.
More Military Family Reunions
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Henry Payne and Townhall |
Simon and Garfunkel, "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)"
