Take heart. There are hordes of us:
It breaks down as somewhat uncomfortable, 21 percent and strongly uncomfortable, 42 percent.Liberals have won a string of victories on gay marriage and health care reform this year, but a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds a large majority of Americans are unhappy with where the nation is headed on social issues.Sixty three percent of people say they are uncomfortable with the country's overall direction on social issues these days; four in 10 feel "strongly" uncomfortable about the nation's changes.
Democrats, 43, independents, 68 and Republicans 82. Whites, 69, non-whites, 51.
Try as they might the jackboots have not completely trampled out our sense of real human dignity and decency.
With these kinds of numbers, the damage need not be considered irreversible.
Then stop calling us ignorant cattle masses.
ReplyDeleteThere are still plenty of ignorant cattle, including some overlap with those who are in the uncomfortable group in this poll. There is still much work to do in the area of getting people to understand what American government is for and what it is not for.
ReplyDeleteThe constitutionality of the Social Security Act was settled in a set of Supreme Court decisions issued in May 1937.
ReplyDeleteI did not know there were jackboots here before we were post-Ameerican. You calling my grandparents and parents ignorant cattle too?
ReplyDeleteTwo things about Social Security - and for that matter, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, and any other such program:
ReplyDelete1.) The government designed by the Framers was not designed to provide the citizen "security" against life's uncertainties. That notion came along with the Progressives in the early 20th Century.
2.) It does not work. Social Security is headed toward insolvency, sooner, not later.
http://news.investors.com/blogs-capital-hill/072215-763012-social-security-and-medicare-are-headed-for-fiscal-ruin.htm
The Social Security Administration's latest annual report says what it has been saying for several years now — its disability insurance program will become insolvent in 2016.
The only thing new is that 2016 is now less than a year away, and since lawmakers have ignored those prior warnings and refused to consider reforms to the disability program, the problem is now "urgent."
As anyone who has followed this knows, the disability insurance rolls have been skyrocketing for years, a combination of loosened eligibility rules, a bad recession, and President Obama's anemic economic recovery.
In June, there were almost 11 million people collecting disability benefits, an increase of nearly 34% over the past decade. The rapid rise led to an explosion in the program's cost, which is financed through a dedicated portion of the Social Security payroll tax.
Obama says no problem, just shift money from Social Security over to the disability insurance program. This would accomplish nothing, however, since Social Security itself is headed for insolvency as well.
Indeed, the outlook for Social Security and Medicare is only marginally better than for the disability program.
Medicare's "trust fund" will run out of money by 2030 — a mere 15 years from now. And that's if all goes well. Social Security's "Trust Fund" will run dry by 2036 — again, if all goes well.
When that happens, the payroll taxes that are used to finance the two programs won't come close to covering all the benefits being paid to retirees. And unless the programs are reformed before then, that will mean either a huge tax increase of steep benefit cuts — or both.
To get a sense of how big this gap is, consider the fact that in 22 years the annual shortfall for Social Security will total about $638 billion, and rising. That's if everything goes as planned. If the program's costs are higher than expected, the shortfall would be $1.3 trillion.
And it's very likely that all won't go as planned.
A recent study by researchers at Harvard and Dartmouth found that the Social Security Administration's forecasts for the solvency of these programs has grown increasingly unreliable.
To make its solvency forecasts, the SSA has to make assumptions about everything that can affect the program's costs and revenues — things like economic growth, life expectancy, fertility rate.
The researchers found they've been getting these wrong, and that, since 2000 "the direction of the biases are all in the same direction, making the Social Security trust funds look healthier than they turned out to be."
I use the term "Cattle" for those who, even when presented with these facts, would say, "Well, then, the Congress or the SS Administration or somebody will have to figure out how to shore it up. Frances Perkins and FDR promised me that a money, and I deserve to get it!" Cattle stand around blankly staring, assuming that the two-legged creatures will see that they are fed and housed
Citing a Supreme Court decision to affirm the morality or the economic logic of anything is an unwise way to argue.
ReplyDeleteDred Scott or Plessey v Ferguson, anyone?
The progressives are not going to curl up in a little hole and die just for you. You'll have to kill us. Picture us as commies and try to kill us.
ReplyDeletehe Social Security Trust Fund should currently have $2.5 trillion in surplus. So how is it that these checks could stop being issued if the debt ceiling isn't raised? Economics professor Dr. Allen Smith, author of The Looting of Social Security: How The Government is Draining America's Retirement Account, has been reporting on the theft of Social Security funds for years. As he sums it up:
ReplyDelete"The government's $2.5 trillion debt to Social Security is the real reason that so many politicians want to cut benefits. They are trying to find a way to avoid having to repay the looted money.... Given the fact that much of the surplus revenue from the 1983 payroll tax hike ended up in the pockets of the super rich in the form of income tax cuts, I propose a special tax on this group of taxpayers to recoup the missing Social Security money. The government used revenue from the Social Security payroll tax hike to fund tax cuts for the rich because that was where the money was. I think the government should recover the 'embezzled' money by taxing the rich."
Read more at http://www.sott.net/article/232087-Social-Security-Scam-Where-Did-the-2-5-Trillion-Surplus-Go
Alas, Social Security is an unfunded liability, because all the money working people put into it was stolen by Republicans and Democrats in order to pay for wars and bailouts for mega-rich bankers like Goldman Sachs.
ReplyDeleteWhat I am about to tell you might come as a shock, but it is the absolute truth, which you can verify for yourself by going online to the government’s annual OASDI and HI reports. According to the official 2010 Social Security reports, between 1984 and 2009 the American people contributed $2 trillion, that is $2,000 billion, more to Social Security and Medicare in payroll taxes than was paid out in benefits.
What happened to the surplus $2,000 billion, or $2,000,000,000,000.
The government spent it.
And when the next economic meltdown comes, more lies will be exposed, and old folks without their trusted savings are bust. Do you really trust your financial advisor? Of course your's is the best. He/she is part of a scam too with their hidden fees. Corporate America got themselves off the hook for pensions in the early 80s. They described a wonderful world where we could take control of our own finances for a successful senescence. Yeah, right.
ReplyDeleteOh, horse shit. Tax cuts have nothing to do with government paying for anything. The mentality that says that government needs to keep doing all this stuff that it does and that if we cut taxes (for "the rich," doncha know) that it deprives government of necessary funds is exactly what LITD means by Freedom-Hatred.
ReplyDeleteThat gets back to my basic point. A person's money is his or her own. Government has no business getting its mitts on one penny of it except for Constitutionally specified functions - and James Madison didn't say one stinking word about any damn Social Security.
One thing you are correct about is that the government spent the surplus on other stuff. That is why government programs for "social insurance" are a bad idea. The general caliber of the people we send to Congress is such that they can't resist such a temptation.
So it's gone, which gets us back to the basic point of the IBD editorial. It's gone, and there's no way to make it up.
And this tendency to generalize about entire occupational fields - law enforcement, investment advising - indicates a really stunted understanding of the world.
You're a generalizer too, my man. Freedom Haters, ignorant cattle masses, for just 2 for starters.
ReplyDeleteThese are terms with specific meanings. People who go in for minimum wage, universal health care, EPA regs, fines for Christian businesses that decline to sever homosexual "weddings," and who oppose right-to-work laws = Freedom-Haters. People who think that there is some kind of "right" to health care, or a job, or "affordable" housing, or "clean" air and that the government should guarantee the provision thereof = cattle-masses.
ReplyDelete