My Mom doesn't use her computer much anymore for reasons beyond this post, but it opened up her world, especially in terms of emails. My mom was connecting with old schoolmates she hadn't seen in decades. She had graduated from a Catholic girls high school in Fall River (a Massachusetts town) fairly close to Providence, RI. She was 18 when she married Dad. an enlisted jet mechanic (I came along about 13 months later). Other than an assignment at Otis AFB on Cape Cod after I was born in Texas we never really never returned to New England during dad's career, and Dad retired in the San Antonio area. Other than occasional visits back home. Mom never got a chance to connect with old friends. Mom's best friend Phyllis met Dad's nearest older brother Ray at the folks' wedding. so if and when the folks visited New England Uncle Ray's house in Connecticut was a focal point. One of the annoying things is they screwed up Ray's surname on his birth certificate (the first e is silent) and my paternal grandparents didn't catch it. I think it was discovered when Uncle Ray served in the Korean War--and for some reason he didn't correct it but took some perverse pride in the typo. Bit it did piss me off when cousin Celeste mailed an invitation to me as "Ronald Guilmette"..
So Mom regularly emailed Aunt Phyllis and her closest cousin Connie. Of course they often called each other. Email was an easy workaround to telephone tag. As an MIS PhD, I often served as her support desk. She gave fuzzy descriptions on issues like not getting emails, so I would try to get her to check her Internet connection but it would turn out she was checking the wrong email folder for her filters. Thankfully, my baby brother lives nearby and could resolve most issues without my intervention.
The problem with Mom's embrace of email is she forwarded a lot of stuff people sent her. One time she forwarded me, of all things, a Paul Krugman column. [Paul Krugman ia a famous progressive Nobel-winning economist, more recently known for a regular NYT column, more about progressivism than economics. He recently retired his column.] The key point is I don't think Krugman ever wrote a column I agree with. Mom isn't a progressive. "Why did you send this to me?" "I thought it was interesting." Who the hell sent it to her? Then it hit me. Oscar, my late dad's best friend. He was an old-time Southern Democrat who never left the Dems like the rest of us when the progressives hijacked the national party. Oscar has had a pathological hatred for George W. Bush. Apparently a number of his letters to the editor have been published in the Express-News,.
But what really drove me nuts is people were sending her literally every Internet hoax or chain letter out there and she was forwarding everything she got to like everyone she knew. It was like a never-ending game of Whac-a-Mole. I think Snopes alone debunked at least 80%. i sent her detailed instructions on how to search on Snopes but that went nowhere. i felt a moral obligation for my Mom propagating this rubbish and basically debunked dozens in reply-alls.
I stopped the debunking a decade back. It's possible I've seen the current email chain letter before. I know I've seen some variation of the allegation of Congress spending entitlement money before. but of all things i think my 14-months-younger RN sister's husband republished it on Facebook. It's on social security, and I've probably tweeted dozens of related tweets. I think my sister and her spouse are not happy because I think their income is high enough to get taxed on part of their benefits. So they are probably angry enough to believe this stuff, a big lie being that Congress is taking payroll tax revenue to pay government spending elsewhere and there is more than enough money to cover social security. No, all payroll taxes are going to current program beneficiaries. It is true by law the reserve has to invest in US debt but that's older or rolled over old debt. The fact is we haven't put new payroll tax money in the trust fund since probably 2010 when the first Boomers hit 65. The problem is that we are using reserves to make up the difference for full checks, and the reserve will probably run out by 2034. Then everyone will take a cut unless the Congress funds the difference with reforms or out of revenues. This is a dead serious issue, and we need a serious fix sooner than later.
So here is the email my BIL reposted: (from some dude named Brad Smith)
I DON'T THINK PISSED REALLY COVERS IT ! ! !
Alan Simpson, the Senator from Wyoming calls senior citizens the Greediest Generation as he compared "Social Security " to a Milk Cow with 310 million teats. Here's a response in a letter from PATTY MYERS in Montana ... I think she is a little ticked off! She also tells it like it is!
"Hey Alan, let's get a few things straight!!!
1. As a career politician, you have been on the public dole (tit) for FIFTY YEARS.
2. I have been paying Social Security taxes for 48 YEARS (since I was 15 years old. I am now 63).
3. My Social Security payments, and those of millions of other Americans, were safely tucked away in an interest bearing account for decades until you political pukes decided to raid the account and give OUR money to a bunch of zero losers in return for votes, thus bankrupting the system and turning Social Security into a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.
4. Recently, just like Lucy & Charlie Brown, you and "your ilk" pulled the proverbial football away from millions of American seniors nearing retirement and moved the goalposts for full retirement from age 65 to age, 67. NOW, you and your "shill commission" are proposing to move the goalposts YET AGAIN.
5. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying into Medicare from Day One, and now "you morons" propose to change the rules of the game. Why? Because "you idiots" mismanaged other parts of the economy to such an extent that you need to steal our money from Medicare to pay the bills.
6. I, and millions of other Americans, have been paying income taxes our entire lives, and now you propose to increase our taxes yet again. Why? Because you "incompetent bxxxxds" spent our money so profligately that you just kept on spending even after you ran out of money. Now, you come to the American taxpayers and say you need more to pay off YOUR debt.
To add insult to injury, you label us "greedy" for calling "bxxxxxxt" to your incompetence.
Well, Captain Bxxxxxxit, I have a few questions for YOU:
1. How much money have you earned from the American taxpayers during your pathetic 50-year political career?
2. At what age did you retire from your pathetic political career, and how much are you receiving in annual retirement benefits from the American taxpayers?
3. How much do you pay for YOUR government provided health insurance?
4. What cuts in YOUR retirement and healthcare benefits are you proposing in your disgusting deficit reduction proposal, or as usual, have you exempted yourself and your political cronies?
It is you, Captain Bxxxxxxt, and your political co-conspirators called Congress who are the "greedy" ones. It is you and your fellow nutcase thieves who have bankrupted America and stolen the American dream from millions of loyal, patriotic taxpayers.
And for what? Votes and your job and retirement security at our expense, you lunk-headed, leech.
That's right, sir. You and yours have bankrupted America for the sole purpose of advancing your pathetic, political careers. You know it, we know it, and you know that we know it.
And you can take that to the bank, you miserable son of a bxxxxx.
P.S. And stop calling Social Security benefits "entitlements". WHAT AN INSULT!!!!
I have been paying in to the SS system for 45 years “It's my money”-give it back to me the way the system was designed and stop patting yourself on the back like you are being generous by doling out these monthly checks .
EVERYONE!! If you agree with what a Montana citizen, Patty Myers, says, please PASS IT ON!!!
First of all, let me spare you the Snopes trip. I found the yellow-shaded text cloned almost word for word in a search on Snopes here. [Look at the second color-shaded section.] about the only differences iI could find is Snopes mentions an anonymous dude from Montana, and this version lists a supposed lady by name, and Snopes doesn't mask the mild profanity. And Snopes had a preface/motivating section, which isn't part of this copy. [See the first shaded section on Snopes.] [Oh, and I found another copy of the excerpted email online here]
It's difficult to find any valid links and I don't think Snopes really delineates true or false hood, but I have found this email copy pf the referenced milk cow reference via CBS. I did find a reference to the "greediest generation' in a Casper interview post here.
Most of the Snopes analysis is focused on trying to answer the four questions where Boomers, upset at Simpson's provocative rhetoric, are trying to turn the tables on Simpson, by trying to argue he is the greedy, serving 12 years in the Wyoming House and 18 years in the US Senate. That makes 30 years if you mix/match state and federal service, not 50. unless they are also referencing retirement money
Look, I'm a Boomer myself with no other pension (public or private) than social security if and when I retire. And I'm telling you there is a real problem, only not the 2037 date Simpson used, but more like a 2034. And so i'm interested more on the underlying finances. I get the frustration. I've been paying payroll taxes since I was working part-time at OLL as a college freshman, often mopping at 6 am. I think I was exempt when I was a visiting professor at ISU for a year. (I think Illinois had its own pension system for educators.)
I didn't realize when I first read the email it was like 14 years old. Why the hell are they beating down on a 93-year-old former senator eho has been out of office for over 25 years? Then I remember the early Obama era Simpson-Bowles Commission. As a fiscal conservative, I embraced the initiative to compromise fiscal reform on both sides of the budget: revenues and spending. It does provide a context for explaining one claim which never made sense to me, every time I've seen it repeated in some form;
you political pukes decided to raid the account and give OUR money to a bunch of zero losers in return for votes, thus bankrupting the system and turning Social Security into a Ponzi scheme that would...Because "you idiots" mismanaged other parts of the economy to such an extent that you need to steal our money from Medicare to pay the bills
I never understood what the hell they were talking about. payroll tax money never went to fund other non-entitlement government spending. There is one sense in which it's true: the trust fund by law has to invest in US debt (I would prefer a more diversified, higher earning asset base, but Congressional Dems wrote it into law). But only a minor portion of our $36T debt is held by the trust fund and we really haven't had leftover program savings for buying new debt since Boomers started accelerating into retirement about 15 years back.
So I think they are thinking the Simpson-Bowles commission was cutting a deal on the backs of senior citizen beneficiaries which was not remotely true. The commission never discussed cutting senior payments, From Wikipedia;
$238 billion in Social Security reform, to be used to ensure the program is sustainably solvent in the infinite horizon by slowing benefit growth for high and medium-income workers, increase the early and normal retirement age to 68 by 2050 and 69 by 2075 by indexing it to longevity, index cost of living adjustments to the Chained-CPI, include newly hired state and local workers after 2020, increase the payroll tax cap to cover 90 percent of wages by 2050 and creates a new minimum and old-age benefit.
Translated into plain English, they were trying to stretch the trust fund guaranteeing full checks if payroll taxes were inadequate to fund benefits, mostly by trying to cut costs by deferring benefits, trying to limit adjustments at the upper end of distributions by means testing and by more conservative cost of living increases (based on senior-related costs)
But in the big picture, Obama never really backed the commission's proposals and the commission itself did not reach the necessary votes to get a floor vote. so mostly the chain letter was really pushing on a string over a proposal that was a long shot from the get-go and they were pissed at blunt Simpson's colorful rhetoric aimed at his critics.
But here's an earlier writeup of my response to this Internet chain letter;
I have to go to basics. The social security system is not like a 401K with diversified assets. Nobody is "stealing" anything. All payroll taxes go to pay current beneficiaries. In years where we paid enough to have something left for the future, it goes into the trust funds. But Dems insisted it could only be invested in low-earning US debt. That is what the chain letter writer is talking about. But what you're totally missing is that we've been drawing down on the trust fund since the baby boomers started retiring, roughly 2010. The trust fund will run out in around 2034. That's the difference in getting a full social security check. That means an automatic benefit cut of maybe 20% in 2035. Reasons: the biggest generation is retiring and living longer, while fewer young workers are paying payroll taxes. These idiot chain letter writers are deluding people like you who don't understand the basics of the problem . Congress isn't addressing the problem. Oh, maybe Congress will fund the difference out of general revenues if we don't get some mix of revenues and cost containment , but we are already paying more in interest on the national debt than on national defense. Do you really want to gamble on their funding the difference?
Finally, the end of the chain letter is pissed off by the descriptions of social security as an entitlement. This is a BS soundbite which I think I've written tweets about. I'm not sure where it started (maybe it was introduced oor promoted by advocacy groups like AARP). All this means--an SSA itself uses the term and spells it out--is the government has given you a guaranteed right to participate in the programs. i think you have to pay in at least 10 years of payrolls taxes, currently 15,3% of your first $166K or so of income a year. half of which is paid on your behalf by your employer. No one is suggesting it's welfare. What the talking point may be referring is that some people do pull out, e.g., lower income and long retirements than they ever put in. Longer longevity means we should have paid more sooner than later since a trust fund should not be running out in 9 years, instead of putting all the burden on workers starting next decade to shore up the system. Politicians don't want to risk taxpayer anger for pushing up payroll tax rates. but certainly workers and future beneficiaries should have been putting more into the system when we started drawing down on the trust fund, At that point it was clear we were paying out money saved for our future.
